The fog of battle: Town vs. gown

Monday 10 February 2025

Eskişehir, Türkiye

The streets of Oxford ran red on 10 February 1355, in what became known as the St. Scholastica Day riot.

A quarrel over ale — at least, that is how the story begins.

Two university students, unsatisfied with their drinks, threw words like daggers at a tavern keeper.

Words became fists.

Fists became weapons.

The town rose against the scholars, and the scholars, backed by their privileged institution, fought back.

When the dust settled, nearly a hundred lay dead.

A brutal, bloody reminder that the ivory tower is never truly separate from the world outside its gates.

And is this not always the way?

The scholars, absorbed in their theories and musings, believing themselves above the mundane concerns of the laboring world.

The townsfolk, resentful of their arrogance, their perceived detachment from reality.

The tension between knowledge and necessity, thought and action, intellect and instinct — this war between town and gown never truly ended.

Town and gown are two distinct communities of a university town; ‘town‘ being the non-academic population and ‘gown‘ metonymically being the university community, especially in ancient seats of learning such as Oxford, although the term is also used to describe modern university towns as well as towns with a significant public school.

The metaphor is historical in its connotation but continues to be used in the literature on urban higher education and in common parlance.

During the Middle Ages, students admitted to European universities often held minor clerical status and donned garb similar to that worn by the clergy.

These vestments evolved into the academic long black gown, worn along with hood and cap.

The gown proved comfortable for studying in unheated and draughty buildings and thus became a tradition in the universities.

The gown also served as a social symbol, as it was impractical for physical manual work.

The hood was often adorned with the colors of the colleges and designated the young scholar’s university affiliation.

Thus by their distinctive clothing, the students were set apart and distinguished from the citizens of the town; hence the phrase “town and gown“.

Academic teaching had been ongoing at Oxford since 1096.

As a University it grew rapidly from 1167 and was given a Royal Charter in 1248, formalizing some of its positions and functions. 

Above: Coat of arms of the University of Oxford

In 1334, Oxford, a town of 5,000 residents, was the 9th wealthiest settlement in England. 

In 1349, the Black Death affected the town.

The first-known case in England was a seaman who arrived at Weymouth, Dorset, from Gascony in June 1348.

Above: Weymouth, Dorset, England

By autumn, the plague had reached London.

By summer 1349 it covered the entire country, before dying down by December.

Low estimates of mortality in the early 20th century have been revised upwards due to re-examination of data and new information, and a figure of 60% of the population is widely accepted.

Many townspeople died or left.

A quarter of the scholars perished. 

The town began to recover soon afterwards, but its finances had been deeply affected. 

During the first part of the 14th century the population was aware of the decline of Oxford’s fortunes.

This coincided with disturbance and unrest between the town and university.

Although co-operation between the University’s senior members and the town’s burgesses was the norm, town and gown rivalry existed and relations would periodically deteriorate into violence. 

On the occasions when peace settlements were imposed on the two sides, the outcome favored the university.

In 1209, two Oxford scholars were lynched by the town’s locals following the death of a woman.

Among those who left the town to study elsewhere were some who settled in Cambridge to start the university that year. 

Above: Coat of arms of the University of Cambridge

In 1248, a Scottish scholar was murdered by the citizens. 

Above: Flag of Scotland

Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, enforced a ban of excommunication on the culprits.

Above: Portrait of Bishop Robert Grosseteste (1168 – 1253)

Henry III fined the town’s authorities 80 marks. 

Above: Portrait of English King Henry III (1207 – 1272)

Violence continued to break out periodically.

Twelve of the 29 coroners’ courts held between 1297 and 1322 concerned murders by the students.

Many of these went unpunished by the University or the law. 

In February 1298, a citizen was murdered by a student.

One of the students was killed by townspeople.

The townsfolk responsible for killing the scholar were excommunicated and the town was fined £200 in damages.

There were no punishments given to the students. 

This was the first occasion that the town’s bailiffs were recorded as taking part in the violence.

It was a feature of several subsequent altercations.

Often the scholars rioted among themselves, as they did in 1252, 1267, 1273 and 1333 – 1334.

By the early 14th century “altercations and violence between citizens and scholars were commonplace“, according to the historian Laurence Brockliss. 

In a 1314 riot between the two main factions of the university — the Northernmen and the Southernmen, 39 students were known to have committed murder or manslaughter.

Seven were arrested and the remainder sought religious sanctuary or escaped. 

In 1349, scholars from Merton College rioted to have John Wylliot, their preferred candidate, elected Chancellor of the University.

Above: Merton College, Oxford University

On 10 February 1355 — Saint Scholastica Day — several university students went for a drink at the Swindlestock Tavern. 

The tavern was located in the centre of Oxford, on the corner of the streets now called St Aldate’s and Queen Street, at Carfax.

Above: Site of the Swindlestock Tavern, Oxford, England

The tavern was a regular drinking spot for the students.

Two of the group were Walter de Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield, beneficed clergymen from Southwest England. 

De Spryngeheuse was the former Rector of Hamden, Somerset.

They were served wine by John de Croydon, who was the tavern’s vintner or possibly the landlord, although the scholar Louis Brewer Hall and the antiquarian Anthony Wood, among others, describe him as a friend of John de Bereford, who was the tavern’s owner and the Mayor of Oxford. 

Above: English antiquarian Anthony Wood (1632 – 1695)

De Spryngeheuse and de Chesterfield complained to de Croydon that the wine was sub-standard and asked that they be served a better drink. 

De Croydon refused to listen to the complaints and, according to Wood, “several snappish words passed” between the men before de Croydon gave them “stubborn and saucy language“. 

As a result, de Chesterfield threw his drink in de Croydon’s face. 

Sources differ on what happened next:

According to those sympathetic to the University, de Chesterfield threw his wooden drinking vessel at de Croydon’s head.

Those sympathetic to the townsfolk say the student beat him around the head with the pot. 

A petition by the town authorities to Parliament said the students “threw the said wine in the face of John Croidon, taverner, and then with the said quart pot beat the said John“.

Other customers — both locals and students — joined in the fight, which spilled out of the tavern and onto the junction at Carfax. 

Within half an hour the brawl had developed into a riot.

To summon assistance, the locals rang the bell at St Martin’s, the town’s church.

The students rang the bells of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin.

Humphrey de Cherlton, the Chancellor of the University, tried to calm both sides before things got too far out of hand, but arrows were shot at him and he retreated from the scene.

Men from both sides armed themselves with cudgels, staves and bows and arrows.

When night fell the violence died down.

At this stage no one had been killed or badly wounded.

Above: St. Mary’s Church, Radcliffe Square, Oxford, England

The following morning, in an attempt to stop any recurrence of the violence, the Chancellor issued a proclamation at the Churches of St Martin and St Mary that no one should bear arms, assault anyone or disturb the peace.

He was supported by the chief magistrate of the town. 

At the same time, the town’s bailiffs were urging townsfolk to arm themselves.

The bailiffs were also paying people in the surrounding countryside to come to aid the citizens. 

About 80 townsmen, armed with bows and other weapons, went to St Giles’ Church in the north part of the town, where they knew some scholars were, and chased them to the Augustine priory, killing at least one student and badly injuring several others on the way. 

A master of theology was shot at when he tried to leave the priory.

The bells of both the town and university churches were rung to rally the respective supporters.

Students locked and barricaded some of the town’s gates, to stop an influx of outsiders coming at them from a new direction.

Above: St. Giles Church, Oxford, England

Late in the day of 11 February, up to 2,000 people from the countryside came in the western gate of the town to join the townsfolk, waving a black banner and crying:

“Havoc! Havoc! Smyt fast, give gode knocks!” 

The students, unable to fight against such a number, withdrew to their halls where they barricaded themselves in.

The citizens broke into five inns and hostels, where they finished off much of the food and drink.

Any student found there in his rented rooms or hiding place was killed or maimed. 

After the violence subsided that night, the authorities from the town and the university went through the streets proclaiming in the King’s name “that no man should injure the scholars or their goods under pain of forfeiture“.

In the early hours of the following morning de Cherlton and other senior members of the university left for nearby Woodstock, having been summoned there by King Edward III, who was staying in the village. 

Above: Market Place, Woodstock, England

The proclamation from the King to the townsfolk had no effect.

Above: Effigy of English King Edward III (1312 – 1377), Westminster Abbey, London, England

They again rang the bell at St Martin’s to rally their supporters and that day 14 more inns and halls were sacked by the rioters, who killed any scholars they found.

There were reports that some of the clerics were scalped, possibly “in scorn of the clergy” and their tonsures, according to Wood. 

Other student corpses were buried in dunghills, left in the gutters, dumped into privies or cesspits or thrown into the River Thames.

By the evening of the third day, the passions of the townspeople had been spent.

Many of the scholars had fled Oxford.

Much of the town had been burnt down.

Many of the student halls had been plundered or vandalized, with one notable exception being Merton College, whose students had a reputation for quietness and whose hall was made of stone. 

There is no known figure for the number of townspeople killed, but it may have been about 30. 

The number of students killed in the riots is a matter of disagreement among the sources:

Wood thinks it was 40. 

Others put the number at 63.

After the rioting ended, both the university hierarchy and the town burghers surrendered themselves and the rights of their respective entities to the King. 

He sent judges to the town to determine what had gone on and to advise what steps should be taken.

Four days later the King restored the rights of the scholars and gave them pardons for any offences.

He fined the town 500 marks and sent the town’s Mayor and bailiffs to the Marshalsea Prison in London. 

Above: Marshalsea Prison (1373 – 1842), London, England

While the Royal Commission of Inquiry was in place, John Gynwell (ruled 1347 – 1362), the Bishop of Lincoln, imposed an interdict on the townspeople, and banned all religious practices, including services (except on key feast days), burials and marriages.

Only baptisms of young children were allowed.

Above: Arms of the Bishop of Lincoln

On 27 June 1355, Edward issued a Royal Charter that secured the rights of the University over those of the town.

The document gave the Chancellor of the University the right to tax bread and drink sold in the town, the power to assay the weights and measures used in commerce in Oxford and its environs, other rights relating to the commercial side of Oxford and the power to insist that inhabitants kept their properties in good repair.

The town authorities were left with the power to take action in legal situations where it involved citizens on both sides.

Any action that involved a student or the university on one side was dealt with by the University.

When the interdict was lifted by the Bishop of Lincoln, he imposed an annual penance on the town.

Above: Town Hall, Oxford, England

Each year, on St Scholastica’s Day, the Mayor, bailiffs and sixty townspeople were to walk barefoot and attend St Mary’s Church for Mass for those killed.

The town was also made to pay the University a fine of one penny for each scholar killed.

When each new mayor or sheriff was sworn in, he had to swear to uphold all the University’s rights.

A series of poems, “Poems Relating to the Riot Between Town and Gown on St. Scholastica’s Day“, was written.

The work is in Latin.

According to the historian Henry Furneaux, who edited the works in the 19th century, they could have been written between 1356 and 1357 or in the early 15th century.

The Charter did not end the conflict between the town of Oxford and the University, although there was a hiatus in rioting. 

There were further incidents over the following centuries, although these were on a much smaller scale than the events of 1355.

According to Cobban, “the St Scholastica’s Day riot was the last of the extreme bloody encounters” between town and gown.

Subsequent grievances were settled in the courts or by appealing to the government.

During the reign of Henry VIII, both the university and the town authorities petitioned Thomas Wolsey about who held jurisdiction on various points.

Above: English King Henry VIII (1491 – 1547)

Above: English Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473 – 1530)

The historian C. H. Lawrence observes that the Charter “was the climax of a long series of royal privileges which raised the university from the status of a protected resident to that of the dominant power in the city“. 

Scholars were free from interference from or prosecution by the civil authorities and the chancellor’s jurisdiction covered both civil and religious matters in the town.

It was a unique position for any university in Europe. 

Above: Bridge of Sighs, Oxford, England

The power of the University over the commercial aspects of the town ensured that the colleges were able to acquire much of the central areas of Oxford at the expense of merchants, and the dominance of the land ownership by the university, particularly in the Carfax environs, is as a result of the settlement following the riots. 

One unintended corollary of the growing power of the University was that the town’s weakened authorities did not accommodate plays or theatre until the 16th century.

The situation was exacerbated by a lack of a cathedral in the town, which meant no religious plays were performed for pilgrims.

Above: Clarendon Building, Oxford, England

The annual penance undertaken by the Mayor continued until 1825 when the incumbent refused to take part and the practice was allowed to drop. 

At least one previous Mayor had refused to take part in the annual event:

He was fined heavily and his payment given to the Radcliffe Infirmary. 

Above: Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, England

In an act of conciliation on 10 February 1955 — the 600th anniversary of the riots —

The Mayor, W. R. Gowers, was given an honorary degree.

Above: Oxford Mayor William Richard Gowers (1910 – 1985)

The Vice-Chancellor, Alic Halford Smith, was made an Honorary Freeman of the City, at a commemoration of the events of 1355.

Above: British philosopher Alic Halford Smith (1883 – 1958)

I find my thoughts turn again and again of late to Gulliver’s Travels.

Gulliver’s Travels, originally Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, satirizing both human nature and the “travellers’ tales” literary subgenre.

It is Swift’s best-known full-length work and a classic of English literature.

The English dramatist John Gay remarked:

“It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery.“

The book has been adapted into films, movies and theatrical performances over the centuries.

The book was an immediate success.

Swift claimed that he wrote Gulliver’s Travels “to vex the world rather than divert it“.

Above: Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)

The travels begin with a short preamble in which Lemuel Gulliver gives a brief outline of his life and history before his voyages.

4 May 1699 – 13 April 1702

During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a race of tiny people less than 6 inches (15 cm) tall, much like the little people in mythology, who are inhabitants of the island country of Lilliput.

After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the Lilliput Royal Court.

He is also given permission by the King of Lilliput to go around the city on the condition that he must not hurt their subjects.

At first, the Lilliputians are hospitable to Gulliver, but they are also wary of the threat that his size poses to them.

The Lilliputians reveal themselves to be a people who put great emphasis on trivial matters.

For example, which end of an egg a person cracks becomes the basis of a deep political rift within that nation.

They are a people who revel in displays of authority and performances of power.

Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours the Blefuscudians by stealing their fleet.

However, he refuses to reduce the island nation of Blefuscu to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the royal court.

Gulliver is charged with treason for, among other crimes, urinating in the capital though he was putting out a fire.

He is convicted and sentenced to be blinded.

With the assistance of a kind friend, “a considerable person at court“, he escapes to Blefuscu.

Here, he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship, which safely takes him back home with some Lilliputian animals he carries with him.

Above: Toyshop mural depicting Gulliver surrounded by citizens of Lilliput, Bremen, Germany

20 June 1702 – 3 June 1706

Gulliver soon sets out again.

When the sailing ship Adventure is blown off course by storms and forced to sail for land in search of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and left on a peninsula on the western coast of the North American continent.

The grass of Brobdingnag is as tall as a tree.

He is then found by a farmer who is about 72 ft (22 m) tall, judging from Gulliver estimating the man’s step being 10 yards (9 m).

The giant farmer brings Gulliver home, and his daughter Glumdalclitch cares for Gulliver.

The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money.

After a while the constant display makes Gulliver sick, and the farmer sells him to the queen of the realm.

Glumdalclitch (who accompanied her father while exhibiting Gulliver) is taken into the Queen’s service to take care of the tiny man.

Since Gulliver is too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the Queen commissions a small house to be built for him so that he can be carried around in it.

This is referred to as his “travelling box“.

Between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King of Brobdingnag.

The King is not happy with Gulliver’s accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the use of guns and cannon.

On a trip to the seaside, his traveling box is seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box into the sea where he is picked up by sailors who return him to England.

Above: Gulliver exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer

5 August 1706 – 16 April 1710

Setting out again, Gulliver’s ship is attacked by pirates, and he is marooned close to a desolate rocky island near India.

He is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music, mathematics, and astronomy but unable to use them for practical ends.

Rather than using armies, Laputa has a custom of throwing rocks down at rebellious cities on the ground.

Gulliver tours Balnibarbi, the kingdom ruled from Laputa, as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by the blind pursuit of science without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and on the Royal Society and its experiments.

At the Grand Academy of Lagado in Balnibarbi, great resources and manpower are employed on researching preposterous schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble for use in pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering political conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons.

Gulliver refers in passing to his visit to Tribnia (that is, Britain), called by some Langden (that is, England), where the main occupations are plotting and informing.

Gulliver is then taken to Maldonada, the main port of Balnibarbi, to await a trader who can take him on to Japan.

Above: Gulliver discovers Laputa, the floating/flying island

While waiting for a passage, Gulliver takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib which is southwest of Balnibarbi.

On Glubbdubdrib, he visits a magician’s dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the “ancients versus moderns” theme in the book.

Above: Gulliver dines on Glubbdubdrib

The ghosts include Julius Caesar, Brutus, Homer, Aristotle, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi.

Above: Coinage of Roman general/statesman Julius Caesar (100 – 44 BC)

Above: Ides of March denarius with image of Roman politician / orator / assassin Marcus Junius Brutus (85 – 42 BC)

Above: Greek poet Homer (8th century BC)

Above: Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)

Above: French philosopher René Descartes (1596 – 1650)

Above: French philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592 – 1655)

On the island of Luggnagg, he encounters the struldbrugs, people who are immortal.

They do not have the gift of eternal youth, but suffer the infirmities of old age and are considered legally dead at the age of 80.

Above: The struldbrugs of Luggnagg

After reaching Japan, Gulliver asks the Emperor “to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen of trampling upon the crucifix“, which the Emperor does.

Above: Flag of Japan

Gulliver returns home, determined to stay there for the rest of his days.

Above: Flag of England

7 September 1710 – 5 December 1715

Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to sea as the captain of a merchantman, as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon.

On this voyage, he is forced to find new additions to his crew who, he believes, have turned against him.

His crew then commits mutiny.

After keeping him contained for some time, they resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across, and continue as pirates.

He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes upon a race of deformed savage humanoid creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy.

Shortly afterwards, he meets the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses.

Above: Gulliver in discussion with Houyhnhnms

They are the rulers while the deformed creatures that resemble human beings are called Yahoos.

Some scholars have identified the relationship between the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos as a master/slave dynamic.

Gulliver becomes a member of a horse’s household and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their way of life, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them.

However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and commands him to swim back to the land that he came from.

Gulliver’s “Master“, the Houyhnhnm who took him into his household, buys him time to create a canoe to make his departure easier.

Above: Gulliver Taking His Final Leave of the Land of the Houyhnhnms

After another disastrous voyage, he is rescued against his will by a Portuguese ship.

He is disgusted to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, whom he considers a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person.

Above: Flag of Portugal

He returns to his home in England, but is unable to reconcile himself to living among “Yahoos” and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.

Above: Gulliver converses with horses

Gulliver’s conversation with the King of Brobdingnag preoccupies my thoughts:

“For, I remember very well, in a discourse one day with the King, when I happened to say there were several thousand books among us written upon the art of government, it gave him (directly contrary to my intention) a very mean opinion of our understandings.

He professed both to abominate and despise all mystery, refinement and intrigue, either in a Prince or a Minister.

He could not tell what I mean by secrets of state, where an enemy or some rival nation were not in the case.

He confined the knowledge of governing within very narrow bounds – to common sense and reason, to justice and lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and criminal causes, with some other obvious topics which are not worth considering.

And, he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of Mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.“

The King values practical advancements, especially those that contribute to the well-being of his people, over abstract or artistic pursuits.

He sees intellectualism and philosophy as largely useless unless they yield tangible benefits.

This echoes a tension that has always existed:

The clash between knowledge as an end in itself and knowledge as a means to an end.

Above: Gulliver and the King of Brobdingnag

Then I, through the descriptions of Gulliver, take a stroll through the Academy in Balnibarbi on the island of Laputa.

It is a building with no fewer than 500 rooms and each room possesses a researcher whose experiments are unique to say the least:

• a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers

• an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food by separating the several parts, removing the tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odor exhale and scumming off the saliva
• a new method for building homes by beginning at the roof and working downwards to the foundation

• a man born blind whose employment was to mix colours for painters by distinguishing them by touch and smell

• a device for plowing the ground with hogs

• the employment of spiders in weaving and spinning silk

• the placement of a sundial atop a weathercock to detect the motions of the Earth and Sun with all the accidental turnings of the wind

• the insertion of a wind bellows up the anus to combat any internal disease

• the condensation of air into substance

• softening marble into pillows

• petrifying the hoofs of a living horse to keep the horse from floundering
• sowing the land with chaff
• the propagation of naked sheep through the prevention of the growth of their wool

• the creation of literature by the constant random mixture of words

• the reduction of language to the usage of only nouns

• the avoidance of speech through the usage of objects to demonstrate one’s desires

• education dispensed by the swallowing of ink wafers

• constant medical attention given to every governmental official

• physical abuse upon officials to prevent forgetfulness

• the compulsory vote to the contrary of the opinion that one defended

• the exchange of brain matter to those of opposing ideologies

Above: American writer Gore Vidal (1925 – 2012)

• the imposition of taxes upon a man’s vices and folly, self-esteem, attractiveness, wit, valor and etiquette

• a raffle for employment

• the examination of a person’s diet to determine their loyalty

Above: The Question, Green Arrow and Supergirl, Justice League Unlimited (“Fearful Symmetry“, 21 August 2004)

Gulliver then concludes:

“I saw nothing in this country that could invite me to a longer continuance.“

In storytelling and construction the parts follow a pattern:

• The causes of Gulliver’s misadventures become more malignant as time goes on — he is first shipwrecked, then abandoned, then attacked by strangers, then attacked by his own crew.
• Gulliver’s attitude hardens as the book progresses — he is genuinely surprised by the viciousness and politicking of the Lilliputians but finds the behavior of the Yahoos in the fourth part reflective of the behavior of people.
• Each part is the reverse of the preceding part — Gulliver is big/small/wise/ignorant, the countries are complex/simple/scientific/natural, and Gulliver perceives the forms of government as worse/better/worse/better than Britain’s (although Swift’s opinions on this matter are unclear).
• Gulliver’s viewpoint between parts is mirrored by that of his antagonists in the contrasting part — Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous, and then the King of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same light. Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and his Houyhnhnm master sees humanity as equally so.
• No form of government is ideal — the simplistic Brobdingnagians enjoy public executions and have streets infested with beggars, the honest and upright Houyhnhnms who have no word for lying are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a Yahoo and are equally unconcerned about his reaction to being expelled.
• Specific individuals may be good even where the race is bad —Gulliver finds a friend in each of his travels and, despite Gulliver’s rejection and horror toward all Yahoos, is treated very well by the Portuguese captain, Don Pedro, who returns him to England at the book’s end.

On the subject of learning Gulliver takes us from a land where knowledge must be dismissed if it is impractical to an academy where the impracticality of projects is dismissed in the pursuit of knowledge.

In Brobdingnag, the town triumphs.

In Balnibarbi, the gown governs.

My struggle with town vs. gown — or more precisely, scholastic ideals and expressive freedom versus capitalism and practicality — is an age-old dilemma.

The notion that education should serve a direct economic purpose has largely overshadowed the classical ideal of learning for its own sake.

Universities increasingly function as vocational training centers, producing workers rather than thinkers.

And in this paradigm, the useless — philosophers, poets, artists — are often dismissed, even though they are the ones who make sense of our existence.

At the same time, the perception of the educated as either elitist or detached from reality can be traced to the way knowledge is wielded.

When intellectualism serves power or isolates itself from the common experience, it invites resentment.

Conversely, the dismissal of the uneducated as inferior ignores the wisdom found in lived experience and common sense.

Perhaps Swift, in his satire, warns us against both extremes.

The King of Brobdingnag rejects theoretical knowledge, but the Laputans take the opposite approach — so lost in abstract thinking that they neglect the very basics of life.

It’s a reminder that neither extreme is ideal.

The best knowledge serves both purpose and wonder, both utility and beauty.

Enter Charles Lamb (born 10 February 1775), an essayist who turned away from the grim realities of his age and instead crafted whimsical, deeply personal reflections.

In his time, the literal world of economic hardship and industrial progress marched forward relentlessly, but he carved a space for playfulness, nostalgia, and the intangible joys of the written word.

Above: Charles Lamb (1775 – 1834)

Charles Lamb was an English essayist, poet, and antiquarian, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children’s book Tales from Shakespeare, co-authored with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764 – 1847).

Friends with literary luminaries, Lamb was at the centre of a major literary circle in England.

He has been referred to as “the most lovable figure in English literature“.

Above: 1909 Illustration for Romeo and Juliet, Tales from Shakespeare

Lamb was born in London, the son of John Lamb (1725 – 1799) and Elizabeth (died 1796), née Field. 

Lamb had an elder brother, also John, and sister, Mary.

Four other siblings did not survive infancy.

John Lamb (Lamb’s father) was a lawyer’s clerk and spent most of his professional life as the assistant to barrister Samuel Salt, who lived in the Inner Temple in the legal district of London.

It was there, in Crown Office Row, that Charles Lamb was born and spent his youth.

Above: Inner Temple, London, England

Lamb created a portrait of his father in his “Elia on the Old Benchers” under the name Lovel.

Lamb’s older brother was too much his senior to be a youthful companion to the boy, but his sister Mary, being born 11 years before him, was probably his closest playmate. 

Lamb was also cared for by his paternal aunt Hetty, who seems to have had a particular fondness for him.

A number of writings by both Charles and Mary suggest that the conflict between Aunt Hetty and her sister-in-law created a certain degree of tension in the Lamb household.

However, Charles speaks fondly of her and her presence in the house seems to have brought a great deal of comfort to him.

Some of Lamb’s fondest childhood memories were of time spent with Mrs Field, his maternal grandmother, who was for many years a servant to the Plumer family, who owned a large country house called Blakesware, near Widford, Hertfordshire.

Above: St. John the Baptist Church, Widford, Hertfordshire, England

After the death of Mrs Plumer, Lamb’s grandmother was in sole charge of the large home and, as William Plumer was often absent, Charles had free rein of the place during his visits.

Above: British MP William Plumer (1736 – 1822)

A picture of these visits can be glimpsed in the Elia essay Blakesmoor in H—shire:

Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it.

The tapestried bed-rooms – tapestry so much better than painting – not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots – at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally – all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions.”

Above: Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (aka Ovid)(43 BC – AD 18)

Little is known about Charles’s life before he was seven other than that Mary taught him to read at a very early age and he read voraciously.

It is believed that he had smallpox during his early years, which forced him into a long period of convalescence.

After this period of recovery Lamb began to take lessons from Mrs Reynolds, a woman who lived in the Temple and is believed to have been the former wife of a lawyer.

Mrs Reynolds must have been a sympathetic schoolmistress because Lamb maintained a relationship with her throughout his life.

She is known to have attended dinner parties held by Mary and Charles in the 1820s. 

Sometime in 1781 Charles left Mrs Reynolds and began to study at the Academy of William Bird.

His time with William Bird did not last long, however, because by October 1782 Lamb was enrolled in Christ’s Hospital, a charity boarding school chartered by King Edward VI in 1553.

Above: English King Edward VI (1537 – 1553)

A thorough record of Christ’s Hospital is to be found in several essays by Lamb as well as The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt and the Biographia Literaria of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom Charles developed a friendship that would last for their entire lives.

Above: English writer Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859)

Above: English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)

Despite the school’s brutality, Lamb got along well there, due in part, perhaps, to the fact that his home was not far distant, thus enabling him, unlike many other boys, to return often to its safety.

Years later, in his essay “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago“, Lamb described these events, speaking of himself in the third person as “L“.

I remember L. at school and can well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and other of his schoolfellows had not.

His friends lived in town, and were near at hand and he had the privilege of going to see them, almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was denied to us.”

Christ’s Hospital was a typical English boarding school and many students later wrote of the terrible violence they suffered there.

Above: Logo of Christ’s Hospital

The upper master (principal or headteacher) of the school from 1778 to 1799 was Reverend James Boyer (1736 – 1814), a man renowned for his unpredictable and capricious temper.

In one famous story Boyer was said to have knocked one of Leigh Hunt’s teeth out by throwing a copy of Homer at him from across the room.

Lamb seemed to have escaped much of this brutality, in part because of his amiable personality and in part because Samuel Salt, his father’s employer and Lamb’s sponsor at the school, was one of the institute’s governors.

Above: Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, West Sussex, England

Charles Lamb had a stutter and this “inconquerable impediment” in his speech deprived him of Grecian status at Christ’s Hospital, thus disqualifying him for a clerical career.

While Coleridge and other scholarly boys were able to go on to Cambridge, Lamb left school at 14 and was forced to find a more prosaic career.

For a short time he worked in the office of Joseph Paice, a London merchant.

Above: English merchant Joseph Paice (1728 – 1810)

And then for 23 weeks, until 8 February 1792, he held a small post in the Examiner’s Office of the South Sea House.

Its subsequent downfall in a pyramid scheme after Lamb left would be contrasted to the company’s prosperity in the first Elia essay.

On 5 April 1792 he went to work in the Accountant’s Office for the British East India Company, the death of his father’s employer having ruined the family’s fortunes.

Charles would continue to work there for 25 years, until his retirement with pension (the “superannuation” he refers to in the title of one essay).

Above: Flag of the British East India Company (1600 – 1874)

In 1792 while tending to his grandmother, Mary Field, in Hertfordshire, Charles Lamb fell in love with a young woman named Ann Simmons.

Although no epistolary record exists of the relationship between the two, Lamb seems to have spent years wooing her.

The record of the love exists in several accounts of Lamb’s writing.

“Rosamund Gray” is a story of a young man named Allen Clare who loves Rosamund Gray but their relationship comes to nothing because of her sudden death.

Miss Simmons also appears in several Elia essays under the name “Alice M“.

The essays “Dream Children“, “New Year’s Eve“, and several others, speak of the many years that Lamb spent pursuing his love that ultimately failed.

Miss Simmons eventually went on to marry a silversmith.

Lamb called the failure of the affair his “great disappointment“.

Above: Charles Lamb

Both Charles and his sister Mary had a period of mental illness.

As he himself confessed in a letter, Charles spent six weeks in a mental facility during 1795:

Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol.

My life has been somewhat diversified of late.

The six weeks that finished last year and began this your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton — I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite any one.

But mad I was — and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume if all told.

My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day communicate to you.

Lamb to Coleridge – 27 May 1796

Above: Hoxton Square, Hackney, London, England

Mary Lamb’s illness was more severe than her brother’s.

It led her to become aggressive on a fatal occasion.

On 22 September 1796, while preparing dinner, Mary became angry with her apprentice, roughly shoving the little girl out of her way and pushing her into another room.

Her mother, Elizabeth, began admonishing her for this, and Mary had a mental breakdown.

She took the kitchen knife she had been holding, unsheathed it, and approached her mother, who was sitting down.

Mary, “worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night“, was seized with acute mania and stabbed her mother in the heart with a table knife.

Charles ran into the house soon after the murder and took the knife out of Mary’s hand.

Later in the evening, Charles found a local place for Mary in a private mental facility called Fisher House, which had been found with the help of a doctor friend of his.

Above: English writer Mary Lamb (1764 – 1847)

While reports were published by the media, Charles wrote a letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in connection to the matricide:

My dearest friend

White or some of my friends or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family.

I will only give you the outlines.

My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother.

I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp.

She is at present in a mad house, from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital.

God has preserved to me my senses – I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very sound.

My poor father was slightly wounded and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.

Mr Norris of the Bluecoat school has been very very kind to us, and we have no other friend, but thank God I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do.

Write — as religious a letter as possible — but no mention of what is gone and done with.

With me “the former things are passed away,” and I have something more to do that than to feel.

God almighty have us all in his keeping.

Lamb to Coleridge – 27 September 1796

Above: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Charles took over responsibility for Mary after refusing his brother John’s suggestion that they have her committed to a public lunatic asylum. 

Lamb used a large part of his relatively meagre income to keep his beloved sister in the private “madhouse” in Islington.

Above: High Street, Islington, North London, England

With the help of friends, Lamb succeeded in obtaining his sister’s release from what would otherwise have been lifelong imprisonment.

Although there was no legal status of “insanity” at the time, the jury returned the verdict of “lunacy” which was how she was freed from guilt of willful murder, on the condition that Charles take personal responsibility for her safekeeping.

The 1799 death of John Lamb was something of a relief to Charles because his father had been mentally incapacitated for a number of years since having a stroke.

The death of his father also meant that Mary could come to live again with him in Pentonville.

Above: Cashot Street, Pentonville, North London, England

In 1800 they set up a shared home at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple, where they would live until 1809.

In 1800, Mary’s illness came back and Charles had to take her back again to the asylum.

In those days, Charles sent a letter to Coleridge, in which he admitted he felt melancholic and lonely, adding:

“I almost wish that Mary were dead.“

Later she would come back.

Above: Mary Lamb

Both he and his sister would enjoy an active and rich social life.

Their London quarters became a kind of weekly salon for many of the most outstanding theatrical and literary figures of the day.

In 1869, a club, The Lambs, was formed in London to carry on their salon tradition.

The actor Henry James Montague founded the club’s New York counterpart in 1874.

Above: The Lambs, 3 West 51st Street, New York City, New York, USA

Charles Lamb, having been to school with Samuel Coleridge, counted Coleridge as perhaps his closest, and certainly his oldest, friend.

On his deathbed, Coleridge had a mourning ring sent to Lamb and his sister.

Above: Grave of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, St. Mıchael’s Church, Highgate, London, England

Fortuitously, Lamb’s first publication was in 1796, when four sonnets by “Mr Charles Lamb of the India House” appeared in Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects.

Lamb’s first publication was the inclusion of four sonnets in Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects, published in 1796 by Joseph Cottle.

The sonnets were significantly influenced by the poems of Burns and the sonnets of William Bowles, a largely forgotten poet of the late 18th century.

Above: Scottish poet Robbie Burns (1759 – 1796)

Above: English poet William Lisle Bowles (1762 – 1850)

Lamb’s poems garnered little attention and are seldom read today.

As he himself came to realize, he was a much more talented prose stylist than poet.

Indeed, one of the most celebrated poets of the day — William Wordsworth — wrote as early as 1815 that Lamb “writes prose exquisitely“— and this was five years before Lamb began The Essays of Elia for which he is now most famous.

Above: English poet William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

In 1797, Lamb contributed additional blank verse to the second edition.

Notwithstanding, Lamb’s contributions to Coleridge’s second edition of the Poems on Various Subjects showed significant growth as a poet.

These poems included The Tomb of Douglas and A Vision of Repentance.

Because of a temporary falling out with Coleridge, Lamb’s poems were to be excluded in the third edition of the Poems though as it turned out a third edition never emerged.

Instead, Coleridge’s next publication was the monumentally influential Lyrical Ballads co-published with Wordsworth.

Lamb, on the other hand, published a book entitled Blank Verse with Charles Lloyd, the mentally unstable son of the founder of Lloyds Bank.

Above: English poet Charles Lloyd (1775 – 1839)

Lamb’s most famous poem was written at this time and entitled “The Old Familiar Faces“.

Like most of Lamb’s poems, it is unabashedly sentimental, and perhaps for this reason it is still remembered and widely read today, being often included in anthologies of British and Romantic period poetry.

Of particular interest to Lambarians is the opening verse of the original version of “The Old Familiar Faces“, which is concerned with Lamb’s mother, whom Mary Lamb killed.

It was a verse that Lamb chose to remove from the edition of his Collected Work published in 1818:

I had a mother, but she died, and left me,
Died prematurely in a day of horrors –
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days–
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies–
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a love once, fairest among women:
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her–
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,
Earth seem’d a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father’s dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces–

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed–
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Lamb met the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, on his short summer holiday with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, thereby also striking up a lifelong friendship with William.

In London, Lamb became familiar with a group of young writers who favoured political reform.

Above: English writer Dorothy Wordsworth (1771 – 1855)

In the final years of the 18th century, Lamb began to work on prose, first in a novella entitled Rosamund Gray, which tells the story of a young girl whose character is thought to be based on Ann Simmons, an early love interest.

Although the story is not particularly successful as a narrative because of Lamb’s poor sense of plot, it was well thought of by Lamb’s contemporaries and led Shelley to observe:

“What a lovely thing is Rosamund Gray!

How much knowledge of the sweetest part of our nature in it!“

Lamb continued to clerk for the East India Company and doubled as a writer in various genres, his tragedy, John Woodvil, being published in 1802.

His farce, Mr H, was performed at Drury Lane in 1807, where it was roundly booed.

In the first years of the 19th century, Lamb began a fruitful literary cooperation with his sister Mary.

Together they wrote at least three books for William Godwin’s Juvenile Library.

The most successful of these was Tales From Shakespeare, which ran through two editions for Godwin and has been published dozens of times in countless editions ever since.

The book contains artful prose summaries of some of Shakespeare’s most well-loved works.

According to Lamb, he worked primarily on Shakespeare’s tragedies, while Mary focused mainly on the comedies.

Lamb’s essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation” – originally published in the Reflector in 1811 with the title “On Garrick, and Acting; and the Plays of Shakspeare, considered with reference to their fitness for Stage Representation” – was prompted in response to his viewing of the David Garrick memorial on the west wall of Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, and has often been taken as the ultimate Romantic dismissal of the theatre. 

Above: English playwright David Garrick (1717 – 1779)

In the essay, Lamb argues that Shakespeare’s plays should be read rather than performed to protect them from commercial performance and celebrity culture. 

The essay criticizes contemporary stage practice even as it develops a more complex reflection on the imaginative representation of Shakespearean dramas:

Shakespeare’s dramas are for Lamb the object of a complex cognitive process that does not require sensible data, but only imaginative elements that are suggestively elicited by words.

In the altered state of consciousness that the dreamlike experience of reading stands for, Lamb can see Shakespeare’s own conceptions mentally materialized.”

Besides contributing to Shakespeare’s reception with his and his sister’s book Tales From Shakespeare, Lamb also contributed to the recovery of acquaintance with Shakespeare’s contemporaries. 

On 20 July 1819, at age 44, Lamb, who, because of family commitments, had never married, fell in love with an actress, Fanny Kelly, of Covent Garden, and besides writing her a sonnet he also proposed marriage. 

She refused him.

He died a bachelor.

Above: English actress/singer Frances Maria Kelly (1790 – 1882)

Accelerating the increasing interest of the time in the older writers, and building for himself a reputation as an antiquarian, in 1808 Lamb compiled a collection of extracts from the old dramatists, Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare.

This also contained critical “characters” of the old writers, which added to the flow of significant literary criticism, primarily of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, from Lamb’s pen.

Immersion in 17th-century authors also changed the way Lamb wrote, adding a distinct flavor to his writing style.

Lamb’s friend the essayist William Hazlitt thus characterized him:

“Mr. Lamb does not march boldly along with the crowd.

He prefers bye-ways to highways.

When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive show, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive description over a tottering doorway, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.

Mr. Lamb has the very soul of an antiquarian.”

Above: English writer William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)

Although he did not write his first Elia essay until 1820, Lamb’s gradual perfection of the essay form for which he eventually became famous began as early as 1811 in a series of open letters to Leigh Hunt’s Reflector.

The most famous of these early essays is “The Londoner“, in which Lamb famously derides the contemporary fascination with nature and the countryside.

In another well-known Reflector essay of 1811, he deemed William Hogarth’s images to be books, filled with “the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words.

Other pictures we look at.

His pictures we read.” 

Above: English artist William Hogarth (1697 – 1764)

Lamb would continue to fine-tune his craft, experimenting with different essayistic voices and personae, for the better part of the next quarter century.

His collected essays, under the title Essays of Elia, were published in 1823 (“Elia” being the pen name Lamb used as a contributor to The London Magazine).

The Essays of Elia would be criticized in the Quarterly Review (January 1823) by Robert Southey, who thought its author to be irreligious.

When Charles read the review, entitled “The Progress of Infidelity“, he was filled with indignation, and wrote a letter to his friend Bernard Barton, where Lamb declared he hated the review, and emphasized that his words “meant no harm to religion“.

First, Lamb did not want to retort, since he actually admired Southey, but later he felt the need to write a letter “Elia to Southey“, in which he complained and expressed that the fact that he was a dissenter of the Church, did not make him an irreligious man.

The letter would be published in The London Magazine, in October 1823:

Rightly taken, Sir, that Paper was not against Graces but Want of Grace, not against the ceremony but the carelessness and slovenliness so often observed in the performance of it.

You have never ridiculed, I believe, what you thought to be religion, but you are always girding at what some pious, but perhaps mistaken folks, think to be so.

Charles Lamb, “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esquire“

Above: English poet Robert Southey (1774 – 1843)

A further collection called The Last Essays of Elia was published in 1833, shortly before Lamb’s death.

The essays in the collection first began appearing in The London Magazine in 1820 and continued to 1825.

Lamb’s essays were very popular and were printed in many subsequent editions throughout the 19th century.

The personal and conversational tone of the essays has charmed many readers.

The essays “established Lamb in the title he now holds, that of the most delightful of English essayists“. 

Lamb himself is the Elia of the collection, and his sister Mary is “Cousin Bridget“.

Charles first used the pseudonym Elia for an essay on the South Sea House, where he had worked decades earlier.

Elia was the last name of an Italian man who worked there at the same time as Charles.

After that essay the name stuck.

In his Essays of Elia and its sequel, Last Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb explores a broad range of topics and works with various non-fiction tropes that often edge into the terrain of fiction.

We see him writing obituaries, dream journals, diatribes and tributes.

What unifies Lamb’s essays is his lyrical, conversational writing style.

Like many fellow Romantics, he often employs purple prose and shows off his sharp wit, but the essays themselves remain accessible and often fun.

Elia is the persona Lamb uses when writing essays, so instead of referring to Lamb or “the narrator” these synopses will refer simply to “Elia“:

In “Old China“, Elia details his pet obsession, old china.

The essay starts with — typical for Elia — a flight of fancy, as he gets lost in a scene of a tea ceremony depicted on a cup.

The essay veers into a conversation with Cousin Bridget about whether the days when they were poorer were more fulfilling than those of their comparative wealth.

In “Dream Children: A Reverie“, much of this essay reads as Elia’s elegy to his grandmother, Field, the magnanimous, fearless woman who took care of a mansion where Elia spent much of his childhood.

He recounts Field as well as his late brother John to his children, but when Elia begins to tell the children about their mother Alice, they fade away, and Elia wakes up from a dream.

He never had any children by Alice, since Alice chose to marry another man.

A comical essay which includes many nuggets of fiction, “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” is Elia’s attempt to imagine the provenance of people eating roast pork, a dish that he loves.

He talks about an imaginary ancient boy who burns down his family’s shack but eats the pig that died in the fire and loves it.

The essay veers into a discussion of Elia’s love of sharing food with other people, before ending with a moral conundrum of how animals that are to be eaten should be slaughtered.

In “The South Sea House“, Elia describes the bank where he used to work, the South Sea House, which was the site of a famous financial speculation hoax.

He recounts his various co-workers as well as the owners of the bank, but eventually reveals that his account may be as much of a hoax as the scam that the bank infamously ran.

Above: Coat of arms of the South Sea Company

The South Sea Company (officially: The Governor and Company of the merchants of Great Britain, trading to the South Seas and other parts of America and for the encouragement of the Fishery) was a British joint-stock company founded in January 1711, created as a public-private partnership to consolidate and reduce the cost of the national debt.

To generate income, in 1713 the company was granted a monopoly (the Asiento de Negros) to supply African slaves to the islands in the “South Seas” and South America.

When the company was created, Britain was involved in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701 – 1714) when Spain and Portugal controlled most of South America.

There was thus no realistic prospect that trade would take place, and as it turned out, the Company never realized any significant profit from its monopoly.

However, Company stock rose greatly in value as it expanded its operations dealing in government debt, and peaked in 1720 before suddenly collapsing to little above its original flotation price.

The notorious economic bubble thus created, which ruined thousands of investors, became known as the South Sea Bubble.

Above: The South Sea House, 1754

In “Ellistonia“, Elia writes an obituary for his friend Robert William Elliston, a beloved stage actor whose on-stage and off-stage presences were indistinguishable from one another.

Elliston is described as a passionate man whose only regrets are that he was pigeonholed late in his career for doing what he did best.

Above: English actor Robert William Elliston (1774 – 1831)

“Rejoicings Upon a New Year’s Coming of Age” is a fanciful essay which is effectively a work of fiction imagining a New Year’s Day party where all of the days of the year are personified and mingle with one another.

April Fool’s is the master of ceremonies and creates delightful chaos throughout the celebration.

In “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading“, Elia talks about his compulsive reading habit, praising his favorites, Shakespeare and Milton, while confessing that he’ll read just about anything with text that is put in front of him.

He rails against newspapers and especially the practice of reading them out loud in public settings, as this violates that individualistic style of reading that Elia favors.

Above: English writer William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

Above: English poet John Milton (1608 – 1674)

In “Grace Before Meat“, Elia is typically skeptical of hypocrisy in organized religion, but this is really the essay where he outlines the substance of his critique by way of articulating his own religious and moral convictions.

He believe that grace is usually uttered insincerely, and that only the poor really have dignity in saying it, as they are truly grateful for the opportunity to have food on their table.

This extends to a broader condemnation of the rich.

In “The Old and New Schoolmaster“, Elia talks about the limits of his education based on the old style of pedagogy, which was wholly rooted in learning English and literature pertinent to it.

The new schoolmasters know a little bit about everything so that their pupils’ curiosity can always be satisfied.

The essay ends with a letter from a schoolmaster about how alienated he feels from his students after the passing of his wife.

The essay “The Praise of Chimney Sweepers” is somewhat uncomfortable to read because of its treatment of race, though Elia praises young boys who are chimney sweepers.

He praises the tea they drink and their jovial attitude, before describing dinners that his late friend used to throw for the boys every year where they were treated like nobility.

As with many of Elia’s essays, this one elevates the nobility of the lower classes.

On 27 December 1834, Lamb died of a streptococcal infection, erysipelas, contracted from a minor graze on his face sustained after slipping in the street.

He was 59.

From 1833 until their deaths, Charles and Mary lived at Bay Cottage, Church Street, Edmonton, north of London (now part of the London Borough of Enfield). 

Lamb is buried in All Saints’ Churchyard, Edmonton.

His sister, who was ten years his senior, survived him by more than a dozen years.

She is buried beside him.

There has always been a small but enduring following for Lamb’s works, as the long-running and still-active Charles Lamb Bulletin demonstrates.

Because of his quirky, even bizarre, style, he has been more of a “cult favorite” than an author with mass popular or scholarly appeal. 

Anne Fadiman notes regretfully that Lamb is not widely read in modern times:

“I do not understand why so few other readers are clamoring for his company.

He is kept alive largely through the tenuous resuscitations of university English departments.“

Above: American writer Anne Fadiman

Two of the houses at Christ’s Hospital (Lamb A and Lamb B) are named in his honor.

A major academic prize awarded each year at Christ’s Hospital School’s speech day is “The Lamb Prize for Independent Study“.

Lamb is also honored by The Latymer School, a grammar school in Edmonton, a suburb of London where he lived for a time:

It has six houses, one of which, Lamb, is named after him. 

Above: Logo of the Latymer School

Sir Edward Elgar wrote an orchestral work, Dream Children, inspired by Lamb’s essay of that title.

Above: English composer Edward Elgar (1857 – 1934)

A quotation from Lamb, “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”,’ serves as the epigraph to Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Charles Lamb pub in Islington is named after him.

Henry James Montague, founder of The Lambs Club, named it after the salon of Charles and his sister Mary.

Above: US actor Henry John Mann (aka Henry James Montague)(1843 – 1878)

Charles Lamb plays an important role in the plot of Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Lamb, in his Essays of Elia, often championed the value of learning for its own sake, resisting the notion that knowledge must always serve a practical purpose.

His essay The Old and the New Schoolmaster contrasts the rigid disciplinarian who sees education as mere instruction with the gentler scholar who views learning as a gateway to curiosity and wonder.

His sentimentality for the past, tinged with a skepticism toward industrial progress, mirrors the town vs. gown struggle — the scholar resisting the mechanization of the mind.

Lamb, in his affectionate and nostalgic essays, often lamented the encroachment of practicality upon the realm of the mind.

For him, education was not about producing useful citizens but about cultivating a refined soul, one capable of deep reflection and aesthetic appreciation.

He belonged to a world where scholars were meant to dwell apart, untouched by the grime of industry and the demands of commerce.

His defense of old books, eccentric thinkers, and the impractical joy of literature echoes the argument that the town should serve the gown — that society should provide the scholar with the means to think, write, and teach unencumbered.

For Lamb, learning was not a commodity but a sacred act, diminished when yoked to utility.

Charles Lamb, that most sentimental of essayists, wrote as though the world of intellect was a sanctuary, a refuge from the noisy demands of commerce and governance.

His musings on schoolmasters and ancient books suggest that the scholar should not be burdened by the practical world but rather be protected from it — a candle flickering in the wind of industry’s march.

If left to Lamb’s vision, the scholar remains aloft, untouched by the concerns of the laborer or the merchant.

The town must serve the gown, ensuring that scholars remain free to think, question, and create without obligation to utility.

But in this retreat, does the scholar risk irrelevance, whispering profound truths into an empty hall?

Boris Pasternak knew this war intimately.

Born on 10 February 1890, he was a poet, a dreamer, a man whose words soared above the constraints of his time.

Yet, in Soviet Russia, literature was not merely art — it was propaganda or it was treason.

His masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago, painted a picture too honest for the regime to stomach.

It was banned, its author ostracized.

Here was the war between the literary and the literal in its purest form:

A man fighting to tell his truth, while the state demanded a reality of its own making.

Above: Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890 – 1960)

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890 – 1960) was a Russian and Soviet poet, novelist, composer and literary translator.

Composed in 1917, Pasternak’s first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language.

Pasternak’s translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.

Above: German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

Above: German writer Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805)

Above: Spanish writer Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600 – 1681)

Pasternak was the author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel that takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. 

Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication in the USSR, but the manuscript was smuggled to Italy and was first published there in 1957.

Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize.

In 1989, Pasternak’s son Yevgeny finally accepted the award on his father’s behalf. 

Doctor Zhivago has been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003.

Above: Coat of arms of Russia

Pasternak’s life under Soviet rule embodied the clash between intellectualism and utility.

The Soviet regime demanded that art serve the state, that literature be a tool of propaganda rather than a medium for intellectual and spiritual freedom.

His refusal to conform — seen most clearly in Doctor Zhivago, which exalts individual thought over collective ideology — made him an enemy of the state.

Above: Logo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Pasternak was born in Moscow into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family.

His father was the post-Impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak, who taught as a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.

Above: Russian painter Leonid Pasternak (1862 – 1945)

His mother was Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist and the daughter of Odessa industrialist Isadore Kaufman and his wife.

Pasternak had a younger brother, Alex, and two sisters, Lydia and Josephine.

Above: Boris and Alex Pasternak

The family claimed descent on the paternal line from Isaac Abarbanel, the famous 15th-century Sephardic Jewish philosopher, Bible commentator, and treasurer of Portugal.

Above: Portuguese writer/statesman Isaac Abravanel (1437 – 1408)

Pasternak’s struggles reflect the broader tension of intelligence forced into industry, of education harnessed not to enlighten, but to control.

Pasternak must be part of our discussion, for his struggle was precisely this — to speak wisdom to a system that demanded mere knowledge, to express truth in a world that wished only for obedience.

His Doctor Zhivago was not simply a novel.

It was an act of defiance against an order that sought to control not only literature but the very way people thought and felt.

From 1904 to 1907, Boris Pasternak was the cloister-mate of Peter Minchakievich (1890 – 1963) in Holy Dormition Pochayev Lavra (now in Ukraine).

Above: Pochaiv Monastery, Ukraine

Minchakievich came from an Orthodox Ukrainian family and Pasternak came from a Jewish family.

Some confusion has arisen as to Pasternak attending a military academy in his boyhood years.

The uniforms of their monastery Cadet Corp were only similar to those of Czar Alexander III Military Academy, as Pasternak and Minchakievich never attended any military academy.

Most schools used a distinctive military-looking uniform particular to them as was the custom of the time in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Boyhood friends, they parted in 1908, friendly but with different politics, never to see each other again.

Pasternak went to the Moscow Conservatory to study music (and later to Germany to study philosophy).

Above: Moscow Conservatory

Minchakievich went to Lvov University to study history and philosophy.

Above: Lvov University

The good dimension of the character Strelnikov in Dr. Zhivago is based upon Peter Minchakievich.

Several of Pasternak’s characters are composites.

After World War One and the Revolution, fighting for the Provisional or Republican government under Kerensky, and then escaping a Communist jail and execution, Minchakievich trekked across Siberia in 1917 and became an American citizen.

Above: Flag of the United States of America

Pasternak stayed in Russia.

In a 1959 letter to Jacqueline de Proyart, Pasternak recalled:

I was baptized as a child by my nanny, but because of the restrictions imposed on Jews, particularly in the case of a family which was exempt from them and enjoyed a certain reputation in view of my father’s standing as an artist, there was something a little complicated about this, and it was always felt to be half-secret and intimate, a source of rare and exceptional inspiration rather than being calmly taken for granted.

I believe that this is at the root of my distinctiveness.

Most intensely of all my mind was occupied by Christianity in the years 1910 – 1912, when the main foundations of this distinctiveness — my way of seeing things, the world, life—were taking shape.”

Shortly after his birth, Pasternak’s parents had joined the Tolstoyan Movement.

Novelist Leo Tolstoy was a close family friend, as Pasternak recalled: 

“My father illustrated his books, went to see him, revered him, and the whole house was imbued with his spirit.“

Above: Russian writer Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (aka Leo Tolstoy) (1828 – 1910)

In a 1956 essay, Pasternak recalled his father’s feverish work creating illustrations for Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection.

The novel was serialized in the journal Niva (1870 – 1918) by the publisher Fyodor Marx, based in St Petersburg.

Above: Niva magazine # 17 (1891)

The sketches were drawn from observations in such places as courtrooms, prisons and on trains, in a spirit of realism.

To ensure that the sketches met the journal deadline, train conductors were enlisted to personally collect the illustrations.

Pasternak wrote,

My childish imagination was struck by the sight of a train conductor in his formal railway uniform, standing waiting at the door of the kitchen as if he were standing on a railway platform at the door of a compartment that was just about to leave the station.

Joiner’s glue was boiling on the stove.

The illustrations were hurriedly wiped dry, fixed, glued on pieces of cardboard, rolled up, tied up.

The parcels, once ready, were sealed with sealing wax and handed to the conductor.”

According to Max Hayward, in November 1910, when Tolstoy fled from his home and died in the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo, Leonid Pasternak was informed by telegram and he went there immediately, taking his son Boris with him, and made a drawing of Tolstoy on his deathbed.

Above: Lev Tolstoy Railway Station, Astapovo (now Lev Tolstoy), Russia

Regular visitors to the Pasternaks’ home also included Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin, Lev Shestov and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Above: Russian composer Sergei Rachmanoff (1873 – 1943)

Above: Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872 – 1915)

Above: Russian philosopher Lev Shestov (1866 – 1938)

Above: German writer Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)

Pasternak aspired first to be a musician.

Inspired by Scriabin, Pasternak briefly was a student at the Moscow Conservatory.

Above: Boris Pasternak (1908)

In 1910, he abruptly left for the University of Marburg in Germany, where he studied under neo-Kantian philosophers Hermann Cohen, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp.

Above: Seal of the University of Marburg, Germany

Above: German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804)

Above: German philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918)

Above: German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann (1882 – 1950)

Above: German philosopher Paul Natorp (1854 – 1924)

Pasternak lived in a world where the state believed that education, literature, and knowledge must serve ideology, just as today’s institutions often insist that education must serve the economy.

But he resisted.

He refused to let his writing become a tool of utility over truth.

In doing so, he mirrored what I, too, seek — a way to teach beyond the system’s limitations, a way to remind my students that their learning should be about more than just what is required of them.

In 1910 Pasternak was reunited with his cousin Olga Freidenberg (1890 – 1955).

They had shared the same nursery but had been separated when the Freidenberg family moved to Saint Petersburg.

They fell in love immediately but were never lovers.

The romance, however, is made clear from their letters, Pasternak writing:

You do not know how my tormenting feeling grew and grew until it became obvious to me and to others.

As you walked beside me with complete detachment, I could not express it to you.

It was a rare sort of closeness, as if we two, you and I, were in love with something that was utterly indifferent to both of us, something that remained aloof from us by virtue of its extraordinary inability to adapt to the other side of life.”

The cousins’ initial passion developed into a lifelong close friendship.

From 1910 Pasternak and Freidenberg exchanged frequent letters, and their correspondence lasted over 40 years until 1954.

The cousins last met in 1936.

Pasternak fell in love with Ida Wissotzkaya, a girl from a notable Moscow Jewish family of tea merchants, whose company Wissotzky Tea was the largest tea company in the world.

Pasternak had tutored her in the final class of high school.

He helped her prepare for finals.

They met in Marburg during the summer of 1912 when Boris’ father, Leonid Pasternak, painted her portrait.

Above: Ida and Elena Wissotzky, Leonid Pasternak (1906)

Although Professor Cohen encouraged him to remain in Germany and to pursue a Philosophy doctorate, Pasternak decided against it.

He returned to Moscow around the time of the outbreak of the First World War.

In the aftermath of events, Pasternak proposed marriage to Ida.

However, the Wissotzky family was disturbed by Pasternak’s poor prospects and persuaded Ida to refuse him.

She turned him down and he told of his love and rejection in the poem “Marburg” (1917):

“I quivered. I flared up, and then was extinguished.
I shook. I had made a proposal — but late,
Too late. I was scared, and she had refused me.
I pity her tears, am more blessed than a saint.“

Around this time, when he was back in Russia, he joined the Russian Futurist group Centrifuge (Tsentrifuga) as a pianist.

Poetry was still only a hobby for him at that time. 

It was in their group journal, Lirika, where some of his earliest poems were published.

His involvement with the Futurist movement as a whole reached its peak when, in 1914, he published a satirical article in Rukonog, which attacked the jealous leader of the “Mezzanine of Poetry“, Vadim Shershenevich, who was criticizing Lirika and the Ego-Futurists because Shershenevich himself was barred from collaborating with Centrifuge, the reason being that he was such a talentless poet. 

Above: Russian poet Vadim Shershenevich (1893 – 1942)

The action eventually caused a verbal battle amongst several members of the groups, fighting for recognition as the first truest Russian Futurists:

These included the Cubo-Futurists, who were by that time already notorious for their scandalous behavior.

Above: The Cyclist, Natalia Goncharova (1913)

Pasternak’s first and second books of poetry were published shortly after these events.

Russian Futurism is the broad term for a movement of Russian poets and artists who adopted the principles of Filippo Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism“, which espoused the rejection of the past, and a celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth, industry, destruction of academies, museums, and urbanism. 

It also advocated for modernization and cultural rejuvenation.

Above: Italian poet Filippo Marinetti (1876 – 1944)

The Manifesto celebrated the “beauty of speed” and the machine as the new aesthetic. 

Marinetti explained the “beauty of speed” as “a roaring automobile is more beautiful than the Winged Victory” further asserting the movement towards the future.

Artforms were greatly affected by the Russian Futurism movement within Russia, with its influences being seen in cinema, literature, typography, politics, and propaganda.

The Russian Futuristic movement saw its demise in the early 1920s.

The most important group of Russian Futurism may be said to have been born in December 1912, when the Moscow-based literary group Hylaea issued a manifesto entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.

Above: Group photograph of some Russian Futurists, published in their manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.

Left to right: Aleksei Kruchyonykh (1886 – 1968), Vladimir Burliuk (1886 – 1917), Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 – 1930), David Burliuk (1882 – 1967) and Benedikt Livshits (1887 – 1938).

Another failed love affair in 1917 inspired the poems in his third and first major book, My Sister, Life.

His early verse cleverly dissimulates his preoccupation with Immanuel Kant’s philosophy.

Its fabric includes striking alliterations, wild rhythmic combinations, day-to-day vocabulary, and hidden allusions to his favorite poets such as Rilke, Lermontov, Pushkin and German-language Romantic poets.

Above: Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov (1814 – 1841)

Above: Russian writer Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837)

During World War I, Pasternak taught and worked at a chemical factory in Vsevolodo-Vilva near Perm, which undoubtedly provided him with material for Dr. Zhivago many years later.

Above: Art Gallery (formerly Transfiguration Cathedral), Kama River, Perm, Russia

Unlike the rest of his family and many of his closest friends, Pasternak chose not to leave Russia after the October Revolution of 1917.

Above: After the capture of the Winter Palace, Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Russia (26 October 1917)

According to Max Hayward,

Pasternak remained in Moscow throughout the Civil War (1918 – 1920), making no attempt to escape abroad or to the White-occupied south, as a number of other Russian writers did at the time.

Above: Images of the Russian Civil War

No doubt, like Yuri Zhivago, he was momentarily impressed by the “splendid surgery” of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, but — again to judge by the evidence of the novel, and despite a personal admiration for Vladimir Lenin, whom he saw at the 9th Congress of Soviets in 1921 — he soon began to harbor profound doubts about the claims and credentials of the regime, not to mention its style of rule.”

Above: Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (1870 – 1924)

The terrible shortages of food and fuel, and the depredations of the Red Terror, made life very precarious in those years, particularly for the “bourgeois” intelligentsia.”

Above: Funeral of Moisei Uritsky, Petrograd, 2 September 1918

Translation of the banner:

“Death to the bourgeois and their helpers.

Long live the Red Terror.”

Above: Russian revolutionary Moisei Uritsky (1873 – 1918)

The Red Terror was a campaign of political repression and executions in Soviet Russia carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police.

It officially started in early September 1918 and lasted until 1922. 

Arising after assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin along with the successful assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and party editor V. Volodarsky in alleged retaliation for Bolshevik mass repressions, the Red Terror was modeled on the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, and sought to eliminate political dissent, opposition, and any other threat to Bolshevik power.

Above: Russian politician Moisey Markovich Goldstein (aka V. Volodarsky) (1891 – 1918)

In a letter written to Pasternak from abroad in the 20s, Marina Tsvetayeva reminded him of how she had run into him in the street in 1919 as he was on the way to sell some valuable books from his library in order to buy bread.

He continued to write original work and to translate, but after about the middle of 1918 it became almost impossible to publish.

The only way to make one’s work known was to declaim it in the several “literary” cafes which then sprang up, or —anticipating samizdat — to circulate it in manuscript.

It was in this way that My Sister, Life first became available to a wider audience.”

When it finally was published in 1922, Pasternak’s My Sister, Life revolutionized Russian poetry.

It made Pasternak the model for younger poets, and decisively changed the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Marina Tsvetayeva and others.

Above: Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam (1891 – 1938)

Above: Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892 – 1941)

Following My Sister, Life, Pasternak produced some hermetic pieces of uneven quality, including his masterpiece, the lyric cycle Rupture (1921).

Both Pro-Soviet writers and their White émigré equivalents applauded Pasternak’s poetry as pure, unbridled inspiration.

In the late 1920s, he also participated in the much celebrated tripartite correspondence with Rilke and Tsvetayeva.

As the 1920s wore on, however, Pasternak increasingly felt that his colorful style was at odds with a less educated readership.

He attempted to make his poetry more comprehensible by reworking his earlier pieces and starting two lengthy poems on the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Above: Boris Pasternak

He also turned to prose and wrote several autobiographical stories, notably “The Childhood of Luvers” and “Safe Conduct“.

(The collection Zhenia’s Childhood and Other Stories would be published in 1982.)

In 1922, Pasternak married Evgeniya Lurye, a student at the Art Institute.

The following year their son Yevgeny was born.

Above: Pasternak with his wife Evgeniya Lurye and their son Yevgeny

Evidence of Pasternak’s support of still-revolutionary members of the leadership of the Communist Party as late as 1926 is indicated by his poem “In Memory of Reissner” presumably written upon the premature death from typhus of Bolshevik leader Larissa Reissner aged 30 in February of that year.

Above: Russian writer Larissa Reissner (1895 – 1926)

By 1927, Pasternak’s close friends Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nikolai Aseyev were advocating the complete subordination of the arts to the needs of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

Above: Russian poet Nikolay Aseyev (1889 – 1963)

In a letter to his sister Josephine, Pasternak wrote of his intentions to “break off relations” with both of them.

Although he expressed that it would be deeply painful, Pasternak explained that it could not be prevented.

He explained:

They don’t in any way measure up to their exalted calling.

In fact, they’ve fallen short of it but — difficult as it is for me to understand — a modern sophist might say that these last years have actually demanded a reduction in conscience and feeling in the name of greater intelligibility.

Yet now the very spirit of the times demands great, courageous purity.

And these men are ruled by trivial routine.

Subjectively, they’re sincere and conscientious.

But I find it increasingly difficult to take into account the personal aspect of their convictions.

I’m not out on my own — people treat me well.

But all that only holds good up to a point.

It seems to me that I’ve reached that point.”

Above: State emblem of the Soviet Union

By 1932, Pasternak had strikingly reshaped his style to make it more understandable to the general public and printed the new collection of poems, aptly titled The Second Birth.

Although its Caucasian pieces were as brilliant as the earlier efforts, the book alienated the core of Pasternak’s refined audience abroad, which was largely composed of anti-Communist émigrés.

In 1932, Pasternak fell in love with Zinaida Neuhaus, the wife of the Russian pianist Heinrich Neuhaus.

They both got divorces and married two years later.

Above: Russian pianist Heinrich Neuhaus

Above: Zinaida and Boris Pasternak

Pasternak continued to change his poetry, simplifying his style and language through the years, as expressed in his next book, Early Trains (1943).

In April 1934 Osip Mandelstam recited his “Stalin Epigram” to Pasternak.

The “Stalin Epigram“, also known as “The Kremlin Highlander” is a satirical poem which describes the climate of fear in the Soviet Union.

Mandelstam read the poem only to a few friends.

We are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay,
More than ten steps away you can’t hear what we say.
But if people would talk on occasion,
They should mention the Kremlin Caucasian.
 
 His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits,
 And his accurate words are as heavy as weights.
 Cucaracha’s moustaches are screaming,
 And his boot-tops are shining and gleaming.
 
 But around him a crowd of thin-necked henchmen,
 And he plays with the services of these half-men.
 Some are whistling, some meowing, some sniffing,
 He’s alone booming, poking and whiffing.
 
 He is forging his rules and decrees like horseshoes –
 Into groins, into foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.
 Every killing for him is delight,
 And Ossetian torso is wide.

After listening, Pasternak told Mandelstam: 

“I didn’t hear this, you didn’t recite it to me, because, you know, very strange and terrible things are happening now:

They’ve begun to pick people up.

I’m afraid the walls have ears and perhaps even these benches on the boulevard here may be able to listen and tell tales.

So let’s make out that I heard nothing.“

Above: Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891 – 1938)

Osip Mandelstam was arrested during the repressions of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam.

Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia.

In 1938, Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to five years in a corrective-labour camp in the Soviet Far East.

He died that year at a transit camp near Vladivostok.

On the night of 14 May 1934, Mandelstam was arrested at his home based on a warrant signed by NKVD boss Genrikh Yagoda.

Above: Soviet Secret Police Director Genrikh Yagoda (1891 – 1938)

Devastated, Pasternak went immediately to the offices of Izvestia. 

Above: Logo of Izvestia (“The News“) newspaper

He begged Nikolai Bukharin to intercede on Mandelstam’s behalf.

Above: Russian politician Nikolai Bukharin (1888 – 1938)

Soon after his meeting with Bukharin, the telephone rang in Pasternak’s Moscow apartment.

A voice from the Kremlin said: 

“Comrade Stalin wishes to speak with you.” 

According to Ivinskaya, Pasternak was struck dumb. 

He was totally unprepared for such a conversation.

But then he heard his voice, the voice of Stalin, coming over the line.

The Leader addressed him in a rather bluff uncouth fashion, using the familiar thou form:

‘Tell me, what are they saying in your literary circles about the arrest of Mandelstam?‘ 

Flustered, Pasternak denied that there was any discussion or that there were any literary circles left in Soviet Russia.

Stalin went on to ask him for his own opinion of Mandelstam.

In an “eager fumbling manner” Pasternak explained that he and Mandelstam each had a completely different philosophy about poetry.

Stalin finally said, in a mocking tone of voice: 

“I see, you just aren’t able to stick up for a comrade.”

He put down the receiver.

Above: Russian dictator Joseph Stalin (1878 – 1953)

According to Pasternak, during the 1937 show trial of General Iona Yakir and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Union of Soviet Writers requested all members to add their names to a statement supporting the death penalty for the defendants.

Pasternak refused to sign, even after leadership of the Union visited and threatened him. 

Above: Russian General Iona Yakir (1896 – 1937)

Above: Russian Marshall Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893 – 1937)

Soon after, Pasternak appealed directly to Stalin, describing his family’s strong Tolstoyan convictions and putting his own life at Stalin’s disposal.

He said that he could not stand as a self-appointed judge of life and death.

Pasternak was certain that he would be arrested, but instead Stalin is said to have crossed Pasternak’s name off an execution list, reportedly declaring: 

“Do not touch this cloud dweller!” 

(or, in another version: 

“Leave that holy fool alone!“).

Above: Boris Pasternak

Foolishness for Christ refers to behavior such as giving up all one’s worldly possessions upon joining an ascetic order or religious life, or deliberately flouting society’s conventions to serve a religious purpose — particularly of Christianity.

Such individuals have historically been known as both “holy fools” and “blessed fools“.

The term “fool” connotes what is perceived as feeblemindedness, and “blessed” or “holy” refers to innocence in the eyes of God.

The term fools for Christ derives from the writings of Paul the Apostle. 

Desert Fathers and other saints acted the part of Holy Fools, as have the yurodivy (or iurodstvo) of Eastern Orthodox asceticism.

Fools for Christ often employ shocking and unconventional behavior to challenge accepted norms, deliver prophecies, or to mask their piety.

Above: Vasily the Blessed of Moscow (1468 – 1552) did not wear clothing either in summer or winter.

Pasternak’s close friend Titsian Tabidze did fall victim to the Great Purge.

Above: Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze (1890 – 1937)

In an autobiographical essay published in the 1950s, Pasternak described the execution of Tabidze and the suicides of Marina Tsvetaeva and Paolo Iashvili.

Above: Georgian poet Paolo Iashvili (1894 – 1937)

Ivinskaya wrote: 

“I believe that between Stalin and Pasternak there was an incredible, silent duel.“

Above: Boris Pasternak

The Great Purge, or the Great Terror was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938.

It sought to consolidate Joseph Stalin’s power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and aimed at removing the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky within the Soviet Union. 

Above: Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (1879 – 1940)

The term “great purge” was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror, whose title was an allusion to the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (1792 – 1794) (sometimes referred to as “les épurations“).

The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the USSR.

Starting in 1936, the NKVD under chief Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks, government officials, and regional party bosses. 

Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned or executed by the NKVD.

Above: NKVD emblem

Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. 

The campaigns also affected many other categories of society: the intelligentsia, wealthy peasants — especially those lending out money or wealth (kulaks) — and professionals.

As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, known collectively as wreckers, began affecting civilian life.

The purge reached its peak between September 1936 and August 1938, when the NKVD was under chief Nikolai Yezhov.

Above: NKVD Chief Nikolai Yezhov (1895 – 1940)

The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party, often by direct orders of the Politburo, headed by Stalin.

Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups, and more).

They were executed by shooting, or sent to the Gulag labor camps.

The NKVD targeted certain ethnic minorities with particular force, such as the Volga Germans or Soviet citizens of Polish origin, who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression.

Throughout the purge, the NKVD sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear, and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions during its mass operations.

Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge (1936 – 1938) to be roughly 1.2 million. 

Despite the end of the Great Purge, the widespread surveillance and atmosphere of mistrust continued for decades.

Above: People of Vinnytsia searching through the exhumed victims of the Vinnytsia (Ukraine) massacre, 1943

When the Luftwaffe began bombing Moscow, Pasternak immediately began to serve as a fire warden on the roof of the writer’s building on Lavrushinski Street.

According to Ivinskaya, he repeatedly helped to dispose of German bombs which fell on it.

Above: Emblem of the German Luftwaffe (air force)

In 1943, Pasternak was finally granted permission to visit the soldiers at the front.

He bore it well, considering the hardships of the journey (he had a weak leg from an old injury), and he wanted to go to the most dangerous places.

He read his poetry and talked extensively with the active and injured troops.

Pasternak later said: 

“If, in a bad dream, we had seen all the horrors in store for us after the war, we should not have been sorry to see Stalin fall, together with Hitler.

Then, an end to the war in favor of our allies, civilized countries with democratic traditions, would have meant a hundred times less suffering for our people than that which Stalin again inflicted on it after his victory.“

Above: Boris Pasternak

In October 1946, the twice-married Pasternak met Olga Ivinskaya, a 34 year old single mother employed by Novy Mir.

Deeply moved by her resemblance to his first love Ida Vysotskaya, Pasternak gave Ivinskaya several volumes of his poetry and literary translations.

Although Pasternak never left his wife Zinaida, he started an extramarital relationship with Ivinskaya that would last for the remainder of Pasternak’s life.

Ivinskaya later recalled: 

“He phoned almost every day and, instinctively fearing to meet or talk with him, yet dying of happiness, I would stammer out that I was ‘busy today.’

But almost every afternoon, toward the end of working hours, he came in person to the office and often walked with me through the streets, boulevards, and squares all the way home to Potapov Street. ‘

Shall I make you a present of this square?’, he would ask.“

She gave him the phone number of her neighbour Olga Volkova who resided below.

In the evenings, Pasternak would phone and Volkova would signal by Olga banging on the water pipe which connected their apartments.

Above: Russian writer Olga Ivinskaya (1912 – 1995)

When they first met, Pasternak was translating the verse of the Hungarian national poet, Sándor Petőfi.

Pasternak gave his lover a book of Petőfi with the inscription: 

“Petőfi served as a code in May and June 1947, and my close translations of his lyrics are an expression, adapted to the requirements of the text, of my feelings and thoughts for you and about you.

In memory of it all, B.P., 13 May 1948.“

Pasternak later noted on a photograph of himself: 

“Petőfi is magnificent with his descriptive lyrics and picture of nature, but you are better still.

I worked on him a good deal in 1947 and 1948, when I first came to know you.

Thank you for your help.

I was translating both of you.” 

Ivinskaya would later describe the Petőfi translations as “a first declaration of love“.

Above: Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi (1823 – 1849)

According to Ivinskaya, Zinaida Pasternak was infuriated by her husband’s infidelity.

Once, when his younger son Leonid fell seriously ill, Zinaida extracted a promise from her husband, as they stood by the boy’s sickbed, that he would end his affair with Ivinskaya.

Pasternak asked Luisa Popova, a mutual friend, to tell Ivinskaya about his promise.

Popova told him that he must do it himself.

Soon after, Ivinskaya happened to be ill at Popova’s apartment, when suddenly Zinaida Pasternak arrived and confronted her.

Ivinskaya later recalled,

But I became so ill through loss of blood that she and Luisa had to get me to the hospital, and I no longer remember exactly what passed between me and this heavily built, strong-minded woman, who kept repeating how she didn’t give a damn for our love and that, although she no longer loved Boris Leonidovich herself, she would not allow her family to be broken up.

After my return from the hospital, Boris came to visit me, as though nothing had happened, and touchingly made his peace with my mother, telling her how much he loved me.

By now she was pretty well used to these funny ways of his.”

Above: Olga and Boris

In 1948, Pasternak advised Ivinskaya to resign her job at Novy Mir, which was becoming extremely difficult due to their relationship.

In the aftermath, Pasternak began to instruct her in translating poetry.

In time, they began to refer to her apartment on Potapov Street as, “Our Shop“.

Above: Olga and Boris

On the evening of 6 October 1949, Ivinskaya was arrested at her apartment by the KGB.

Above: Emblem of the KGB

Ivinskaya relates in her memoirs that, when the agents burst into her apartment, she was at her typewriter working on translations of the Korean poet Won Tu-Son.

Her apartment was ransacked and all items connected with Pasternak were piled up in her presence.

Ivinskaya was taken to the Lubyanka Prison and repeatedly interrogated, where she refused to say anything incriminating about Pasternak.

At the time, she was pregnant with Pasternak’s child.

Above: Lubyanka Prison, Moscow, Russia

She had a miscarriage early in her ten-year sentence in the GULAG.

Above: Gulag location map

Upon learning of his mistress’ arrest, Pasternak telephoned Luisa Popova and asked her to come at once to Gogol Boulevard.

Above: Gogolevsky Boulevard, Moscow, Russia

She found him sitting on a bench near the Palace of Soviets Metro Station.

Weeping, Pasternak told her: 

“Everything is finished now.

They’ve taken her away from me and I’ll never see her again.

It’s like death, even worse.“

According to Ivinskaya, 

“After this, in conversation with people he scarcely knew, he always referred to Stalin as a ‘murderer.’

Talking with people in the offices of literary periodicals, he often asked:

‘When will there be an end to this freedom for lackeys who happily walk over corpses to further their own interests?””

Above: Palace of the Soviets

He spent a good deal of time with Akhmatova — who in those years was given a very wide berth by most of the people who knew her.

Above: Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966)

He worked intensively on the second part of Doctor Zhivago.

In a 1958 letter to a friend in West Germany, Pasternak wrote: 

“She was put in jail on my account, as the person considered by the secret police to be closest to me, and they hoped that by means of a grueling interrogation and threats they could extract enough evidence from her to put me on trial.

I owe my life, and the fact that they did not touch me in those years, to her heroism and endurance.“

Above: Olga Ivinskaya

Pasternak’s translation of the first part of Faust led him to be attacked in the August 1950 edition of Novy Mir.

The critic accused Pasternak of distorting Goethe’s “progressive” meanings to support the reactionary theory of ‘pure art‘, as well as introducing aesthetic and individualist values.

In a subsequent letter to the daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva, Pasternak explained that the attack was motivated by the fact that the supernatural elements of the play, which Novy Mir considered, “irrational“, had been translated as Goethe had written them.

Pasternak further declared that, despite the attacks on his translation, his contract for the second part had not been revoked.

When Stalin died of a stroke on 5 March 1953, Ivinskaya was still imprisoned in the Gulag and Pasternak was in Moscow.

Across the nation, there were waves of panic, confusion and public displays of grief.

Pasternak wrote: 

“Men who are not free always idealize their bondage.“

Above: Funeral procession of Joseph Stalin – 9 March 1953

After her release, Pasternak’s relationship with Ivinskaya picked up where it had left off.

Soon after he confided in her: 

“For so long we were ruled over by a madman and a murderer, and now by a fool and a pig.

The madman had his occasional flights of fancy, he had an intuitive feeling for certain things, despite his wild obscurantism.

Now we are ruled over by mediocrities.” 

Above: Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev (1894 – 1971)

During this period, Pasternak delighted in reading a clandestine copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm in English.

In conversation with Ivinskaya, Pasternak explained that the pig dictator Napoleon, in the novel, “vividly reminded” him of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Although it contains passages written in the 1910s and 1920s, Doctor Zhivago was not completed until 1955.

Pasternak submitted the novel to Novy Mir in 1956, which refused publication due to its rejection of socialist realism.

The author, like his protagonist Yuri Zhivago, showed more concern for the welfare of individual characters than for the “progress” of society.

Censors also regarded some passages as anti-Soviet, especially the novel’s criticisms of Stalinism, Collectivization, the Great Purge, and the Gulag.

Pasternak’s fortunes were soon to change, however.

In March 1956, the Italian Communist Party sent a journalist, Sergio D’Angelo, to work in the Soviet Union, and his status as a journalist as well as his membership in the Italian Communist Party allowed him to have access to various aspects of the cultural life in Moscow at the time.

Above: Logo of the Italian Communist Party

A Milan publisher, the communist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, had also given him a commission to find new works of Soviet literature that would be appealing to Western audiences, and upon learning of Doctor Zhivago‘s existence, D’Angelo travelled immediately to Peredelkino and offered to submit Pasternak’s novel to Feltrinelli’s company for publication.

Above: Italian businessman Giangiacomo Feltrinelli

At first Pasternak was stunned.

Then he brought the manuscript from his study and told D’Angelo with a laugh: 

“You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.“

According to Lazar Fleishman, Pasternak was aware that he was taking a huge risk.

No Soviet author had attempted to deal with Western publishers since the 1920s, when such behavior led the Soviet State to declare war on Boris Pilnyak and Evgeny Zamyatin.

Pasternak, however, believed that Feltrinelli’s Communist affiliation would not only guarantee publication, but might even force the Soviet State to publish the novel in Russia.

In a rare moment of agreement, both Olga Ivinskaya and Zinaida Pasternak were horrified by the submission of Doctor Zhivago to a Western publishing house.

Pasternak, however, refused to change his mind and informed an emissary from Feltrinelli that he was prepared to undergo any sacrifice in order to see Doctor Zhivago published.

In 1957, Feltrinelli announced that the novel would be published by his company.

Despite repeated demands from visiting Soviet emissaries, Feltrinelli refused to cancel or delay publication.

According to Ivinskaya: 

“He did not believe that we would ever publish the manuscript here and felt he had no right to withhold a masterpiece from the world – this would be an even greater crime.

The Soviet government forced Pasternak to cable the publisher to withdraw the manuscript, but he sent separate, secret letters advising Feltrinelli to ignore the telegrams.“

Helped considerably by the Soviet campaign against the novel, Doctor Zhivago became an instant sensation throughout the non-Communist world upon its release in November 1957.

In the State of Israel, however, Pasternak’s novel was sharply criticized for its assimilationist views towards the Jewish people.

When informed of this, Pasternak responded: 

“No matter. I am above race.” 

According to Lazar Fleishman, Pasternak had written the disputed passages prior to Israeli independence.

Above: Flag of Israel

At the time, Pasternak had also been regularly attending Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy.

Therefore, he believed that Soviet Jews converting to Christianity was preferable to assimilating into atheism and Stalinism.

The first English translation of Doctor Zhivago was hastily produced by Max Hayward and Manya Harari in order to coincide with overwhelming public demand.

It was released in August 1958, and remained the only edition available for more than fifty years.

Between 1958 and 1959, the English language edition spent 26 weeks at the top of The New York Times‘ bestseller list.

Ivinskaya’s daughter Irina circulated typed copies of the novel in Samizdat.

Above: Samizdat (Russian: ‘self-publishing‘) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader.

The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because printed texts could be traced back to the source.

This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship.

Although no Soviet critics had read the banned novel, Doctor Zhivago was pilloried in the State-owned press.

Similar attacks led to a humorous Russian saying:

“I haven’t read Pasternak, but I condemn him.“

During the aftermath of the Second World War, Pasternak had composed a series of poems on Gospel themes.

According to Ivinskaya, Pasternak had regarded Stalin as a giant of the pre-Christian era. 

Therefore, Pasternak’s decision to write Christian poetry was a form of protest.

On 9 September 1958, the Literary Gazette critic Viktor Pertsov retaliated by denouncing the decadent religious poetry of Pasternak, which reeks of mothballs from the Symbolist suitcase of 1908 –1910 manufacture. 

Above: Alexandre Benois, Illustration to Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, 1904.

The Russian capital was often pictured by symbolists as a depressing, nightmarish city.

Furthermore, the author received much hate mail from Communists both at home and abroad.

According to Ivinskaya, Pasternak continued to receive such letters for the remainder of his life.

In a letter written to his sister Josephine, however, Pasternak recalled the words of his friend Ekaterina Krashennikova upon reading Doctor Zhivago:

“She had said, ‘Don’t forget yourself to the point of believing that it was you who wrote this work.

It was the Russian people and their sufferings who created it.

Thank God for having expressed it through your pen.“

Zhivago is a physician, a scientist, a man of knowledge.

But he is also a poet, a thinker, a soul seeking meaning beyond the machinery of his world.

He is educated, yet his wisdom is unwelcome in a society that values loyalty over independent thought.

According to Yevgeny Borisovich Pasternak: 

“Rumors that Pasternak was to receive the Nobel Prize started right after the end of World War II. 

According to the former Nobel Committee head Lars Gyllensten, his nomination was discussed every year from 1946 to 1950, then again in 1957 (it was finally awarded in 1958).

Above: Swedish writer/physician Lars Gyllensten (1921 – 2006)

Pasternak guessed at this from the growing waves of criticism in USSR.

Sometimes he had to justify his European fame:

‘According to the Union of Soviet Writers, some literature circles of the West see unusual importance in my work, not matching its modesty and low productivity.“

Meanwhile, Pasternak wrote to Renate Schweitzer and his sister, Lydia Pasternak Slater. 

Above: Boris, Lydia, Josephine, and Alexander Pasternak, Leonid Pasternak (1914)

In both letters, the author expressed hope that he would be passed over by the Nobel Committee in favor of Alberto Moravia.

Pasternak wrote that he was wracked with torments and anxieties at the thought of placing his loved ones in danger.

Above: Italian writer Alberto Moravia (1907 – 1990)

On 23 October 1958, Boris Pasternak was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize.

The citation credited Pasternak’s contribution to Russian lyric poetry and for his role in continuing the great Russian epic tradition. 

On 25 October, Pasternak sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy: 

“Infinitely grateful, touched, proud, surprised, overwhelmed.” 

Above: Logo of the Swedish Royal Academy

That same day, the Literary Institute in Moscow demanded that all its students sign a petition denouncing Pasternak and his novel.

They were further ordered to join a “spontaneous” demonstration demanding Pasternak’s exile from the Soviet Union.

Also on that day, the Literary Gazette published a letter which was sent to B. Pasternak in September 1956 by the editors of the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir to justify their rejection of Doctor Zhivago.

In publishing this letter the Soviet authorities wished to justify the measures they had taken against the author and his work.

Above: Novy Mir (“New World“) #4 (2011)

On 26 October, the Literary Gazette ran an article by David Zaslavski entitled, Reactionary Propaganda Uproar over a Literary Weed.

According to Solomon Volkov:

The anti-Pasternak campaign was organized in the worst Stalin tradition:

• denunciations in Pravda and other newspapers
• publications of angry letters from, “ordinary Soviet workers” who had not read the book
• hastily convened meetings of Pasternak’s friends and colleagues, at which fine poets like Vladimir Soloukin, Leonid Martynov, and Boris Slutsky were forced to censure an author they respected.

Above: Russian writer Leonid Martynov (1905 – 1980)

Slutsky, who in his brutal prose-like poems had created an image for himself as a courageous soldier and truth-lover, was so tormented by his anti-Pasternak speech that he later went insane.

Above: Russian writer Boris Slutsky (1919 – 1986)

On October 29, 1958, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League, dedicated to the Komsomol’s 40th anniversary, its head, Vladimir Semichastny, attacked Pasternak before an audience of 14,000 people, including Khrushchev and other Party leaders.

Semichastny first called Pasternak, “a mangy sheep“, who pleased the enemies of the Soviet Union with, “his slanderous so-called work“.

Then Semichastny (who became head of the KGB in 1961) added that:

“This man went and spat in the face of the people.”

And he concluded with:

“If you compare Pasternak to a pig, a pig would not do what he did” because a pig “never shits where it eats.”

Khrushchev applauded demonstratively.

News of that speech drove Pasternak to the brink of suicide.

It has recently come to light that the real author of Semichastny’s insults was Khrushchev, who had called the Komsomol leader the night before and dictated his lines about the mangy sheep and the pig, which Semichastny described as a, “typically Khrushchevian, deliberately crude, unceremoniously scolding“.

Above: Russian politician Vladimir Semichastny (1924 – 2001)

Furthermore, Pasternak was informed that, if he traveled to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Medal, he would be refused re-entry to the Soviet Union.

As a result, on 29 October, Pasternak sent a second telegram to the Nobel Committee: 

“In view of the meaning given the award by the society in which I live, I must renounce this undeserved distinction which has been conferred on me.

Please do not take my voluntary renunciation amiss.” 

The Swedish Academy announced: 

“This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award.

There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place.” 

Above: Stockholm, Sweden

According to Yevgeny Pasternak: 

“I couldn’t recognize my father when I saw him that evening.

Pale, lifeless face, tired painful eyes, and only speaking about the same thing:

‘Now it all doesn’t matter, I declined the Prize.’“

Above: Boris Pasternak

In winning the Nobel Prize, Pasternak was honored for the very thing his country wished to suppress — his insistence that literature must reflect the human soul, not just serve a political purpose.

He was forced to refuse the award, a symbol of how systems will always try to punish those who learn for the sake of wisdom rather than compliance.

Above: Boris Pasternak

Despite his decision to decline the award, the Union of Soviet Writers continued to demonize Pasternak in the State-owned press.

Furthermore, he was threatened at the very least with formal exile to the West.

In response, Pasternak wrote directly to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev:

I am addressing you personally, the C.C. of the C.P.S.S., and the Soviet Government.

From Comrade Semichastny’s speech I learn that the government, ‘would not put any obstacles in the way of my departure from the USSR.’

For me this is impossible.

I am tied to Russia by birth, by my life and work.

I cannot conceive of my destiny separate from Russia, or outside it.

Whatever my mistakes or failings, I could not imagine that I should find myself at the center of such a political campaign as has been worked up round my name in the West.

Once I was aware of this, I informed the Swedish Academy of my voluntary renunciation of the Nobel Prize.

Departure beyond the borders of my country would for me be tantamount to death and I therefore request you not to take this extreme measure with me.

With my hand on my heart, I can say that I have done something for Soviet literature, and may still be of use to it.”

Above: Flag of the Soviet Union (1922 – 1991)

In The Oak and the Calf, Alexander Solzhenitsyn sharply criticized Pasternak, both for declining the Nobel Prize and for sending such a letter to Khrushchev.

Above: Russian writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008)

In her own memoirs, Olga Ivinskaya blames herself for pressuring her lover into making both decisions.

According to Yevgeny Pasternak: 

“She accused herself bitterly for persuading Pasternak to decline the Prize.

After all that had happened, open shadowing, friends turning away, Pasternak’s suicidal condition at the time, one can understand her:

The memory of Stalin’s camps was too fresh.

She tried to protect him.“

Above: Olga and Boris

On 31 October 1958, the Union of Soviet Writers held a trial behind closed doors.

According to the meeting minutes, Pasternak was denounced as an internal émigré and a Fascist fifth columnist.

Afterwards, the attendees announced that Pasternak had been expelled from the Union.

They further signed a petition to the Politburo, demanding that Pasternak be stripped of his Soviet citizenship and exiled to his Capitalist paradise. 

According to Yevgeny Pasternak, however, author Konstantin Paustovsky refused to attend the meeting. 

Above: Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky (1892 – 1968)

Yevgeny Yevtushenko did attend, but walked out in disgust.

Above: Russian writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933 – 2017)

According to Yevgeny Pasternak, his father would have been exiled had it not been for Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who telephoned Khrushchev and threatened to organize a Committee for Pasternak’s protection.

Above: Indian Prime Minister Jawaharial Nehru (1889 – 1964)

It is possible that the 1958 Nobel Prize prevented Pasternak’s imprisonment due to the Soviet State’s fear of international protests.

Yevgeny Pasternak believes, however, that the resulting persecution fatally weakened his father’s health.

Above: Boris Pasternak

Meanwhile, Bill Mauldin produced a cartoon about Pasternak that won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.

The cartoon depicts Pasternak as a GULAG inmate splitting trees in the snow, saying to another inmate: 

“I won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

What was your crime?“

Today’s institutions do not wield their power as the Soviet Union did, but they still insist that knowledge must be measurable, productive, and marketable.

Students are trained for employment, not enlightenment.

They are graded for output, not for insight.

And yet, as Pasternak did, I seek to remind them that learning should be something more.

If Pasternak belongs in this essay, it is because he represents the ultimate proof that education, when truly transformative, will always be at odds with a system that seeks to control knowledge rather than nurture wisdom.

Above: Boris Pasternak

Pasternak’s post-Zhivago poetry probes the universal questions of love, immortality, and reconciliation with God.

Boris Pasternak wrote his last complete book, When the Weather Clears, in 1959.

According to Ivinskaya, Pasternak continued to stick to his daily writing schedule even during the controversy over Doctor Zhivago.

Above: Boris Pasternak

He also continued translating the writings of Juliusz Słowacki and Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

Above: Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809 – 1849)

In his work on Calderon, Pasternak received the discreet support of Nikolai Mikhailovich Liubimov, a senior figure in the Party’s literary apparatus.

Above: Spanish writer Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600 – 1681)

Ivinskaya describes Liubimov as:

“A shrewd and enlightened person who understood very well that all the mudslinging and commotion over the novel would be forgotten, but that there would always be a Pasternak.“

Above: Boris Pasternak

In a letter to his sisters in Oxford, England, Pasternak claimed to have finished translating one of Calderon’s plays in less than a week.

During the summer of 1959, Pasternak began writing The Blind Beauty, a trilogy of stage plays set before and after Alexander II’s abolition of serfdom in Russia.

In an interview with Olga Carlisle from The Paris Review, Pasternak enthusiastically described the play’s plot and characters.

He informed Olga Carlisle that, at the end of The Blind Beauty, he wished to depict “the birth of an enlightened and affluent middle class, open to occidental influences, progressive, intelligent, artistic“. 

However, Pasternak fell ill with terminal lung cancer before he could complete the first play of the trilogy.

Boris Pasternak died of lung cancer in his dacha in Peredelkino on the evening of 30 May 1960.

He first summoned his sons, and in their presence said: 

“Who will suffer most because of my death?

Who will suffer most?

Only Oliusha will, and I haven’t had time to do anything for her.

The worst thing is that she will suffer.” 

Pasternak’s last words were: 

“I can’t hear very well.

And there’s a mist in front of my eyes.

But it will go away, won’t it?

Don’t forget to open the window tomorrow.“

Above: Boris Pasternak’s dacha in Peredelkino, Russia

After Pasternak’s death, Ivinskaya was arrested for the second time, with her daughter, Irina Emelyanova.

Both were accused of being Pasternak’s link with Western publishers and of dealing in hard currency for Doctor Zhivago.

All of Pasternak’s letters to Ivinskaya, as well as many other manuscripts and documents, were seized by the KGB.

The KGB quietly released them, Irina after one year, in 1962, and Olga in 1964. 

By this time, Ivinskaya had served four years of an eight-year sentence, in retaliation for her role in Doctor Zhivago‘s publication.

In 1978, her memoirs were smuggled abroad and published in Paris.

An English translation by Max Hayward was published the same year under the title A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak.

Ivinskaya was rehabilitated only in 1988.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ivinskaya sued for the return of the letters and documents seized by the KGB in 1961.

The Russian Supreme Court ultimately ruled against her, stating that “there was no proof of ownership” and that the “papers should remain in the state archive“. 

Ivinskaya died of cancer on 8 September 1995.

A reporter on NTV compared her role to that of other famous muses for Russian poets:

“As Pushkin would not be complete without Anna Kern, and Yesenin would be nothing without Isadora, so Pasternak would not be Pasternak without Olga Ivinskaya, who was his inspiration for Doctor Zhivago.”

Above: Russian memoirist Anna Kern (1800 – 1879)

Above: Russian poet Sergei Yesenin (1895 – 1925)

Above: American dancer Isadora Duncan (1878 – 1927)

Meanwhile, Boris Pasternak continued to be pilloried by the Soviet State until Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed Perestroika during the 1980s.

Above: Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931 – 2022)

In 1980, an asteroid was named 3508 Pasternak after Boris Pasternak.

In 1988, after decades of circulating in Samizdat, Doctor Zhivago was serialized in the literary journal Novy Mir.

Above: Boris Pasternak

In December 1989, Yevgeny Borisovich Pasternak was permitted to travel to Stockholm in order to collect his father’s Nobel Medal. 

Above: Yevgeny Pasternak (1923 – 2012)

At the ceremony, acclaimed cellist and Soviet dissident Mstislav Rostropovich performed a Bach serenade in honor of his deceased countryman.

Above: Azerbaijani conductor Mstislav Rostropovich (1927 – 2007)

Above: German composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750)

The Pasternak family papers are stored at the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.

Above: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California, USA

They contain correspondence, drafts of Doctor Zhivago and other writings, photographs, and other material, of Boris Pasternak and other family members.

Since 2003, during the first presidency of Vladimir Putin, the novel Doctor Zhivago has entered the Russian school curriculum, where it is read in the 11th grade of secondary school.

Above: Russian President Vladimir Putin

My struggle is not merely within the system, but against its limitations.

In my own way, I am engaged in the same fight as Pasternak — not against an oppressive state, but against an education system that forgets what education is truly for.

Above: Boris Pasternak

And what of William Allen White (born 10 February 1868), the American journalist?

William Allen White (1868 – 1944) was an American newspaper editor, politician, author, and leader of the Progressive movement.

Between 1896 and his death, White became a spokesman for middle America.

At a 1937 banquet held in his honor by the Kansas Editorial Association, he was called “the most loved and most distinguished member” of the Kansas press.”

Above: William Allen White

White lived between worlds, using language as both weapon and bridge.

His words could move masses, shift politics, change reality.

The literary serving the literal.

Above: William Allen White

White began as a political conservative at the early stage of his career.

In 1896 a White editorial titled “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” attracted national attention with a scathing attack on William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats, and the Populists.

White sharply ridiculed Populist leaders for letting Kansas slip into economic stagnation and not keeping up economically with neighboring states because their anti-business policies frightened away economic capital from the state.

Above: Flag of the American state of Kansas

White wrote:

“There are two ideas of government,” said our noble Bryan at Chicago.

Above: US politician William Jennings Bryan (1860 – 1925)

“There are those who believe that if you legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, this prosperity will leak through on those below.

The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class and rest upon them.”

Above: Logo of the American Democratic Party

That’s the stuff!

Give the prosperous man the dickens!

Legislate the thriftless man into ease, whack the stuffing out of the creditors and tell the debtors who borrowed the money five years ago when money “per capita” was greater than it is now, that the contraction of currency gives him a right to repudiate.”

Above: William Allen White

The Republicans sent out hundreds of thousands of copies of the editorial in support of William McKinley during the intensely fought presidential election of 1896, providing White with national exposure.

Above: US President William McKinley (1843 – 1901)

With his warm sense of humor, articulate editorial pen, and uncommon sense approach to life, White soon became known throughout the country.

His Gazette editorials were widely reprinted.

He wrote stories on politics and published many books, including biographies of Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge.

Above: US President Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924)

Above: US President Calvin Coolidge (1872 – 1933)

“What’s the Matter With Kansas?” and “Mary White” (a tribute to his 16-year-old daughter on her death in 1921) were his best-known writings.

Locally he was known as the greatest booster for Emporia.

He won a 1923 Pulitzer Prize for his editorial “To an Anxious Friend“, published 27 July 1922, after being arrested in a dispute over free speech following objections to the way the state of Kansas handled the men who participated in the Great Railroad Strike of 1922.

In his novels and short stories, White developed his idea of the small town as a metaphor for understanding social change and for preaching the necessity of community.

While he expressed his views in terms of the small town, he tailored his rhetoric to the needs and values of emerging urban America.

The cynicism of the post-World War I world stilled his imaginary literature, but for the remainder of his life he continued to propagate his vision of small-town community.

He opposed chain stores and mail order firms as a threat to the business owner on Main Street.

Above: Downtown Emporia, Kansas

The Great Depression (1929 – 1939) shook his faith in a cooperative, selfless, middle-class America.

Above: US migrant mother Florence Thompson (1903 – 1983), “a woman whose plight defined Great Depression warns tragedy will happen again“

Like most old Progressives his attitude toward the New Deal was ambivalent:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt cared for the country and was personally attractive, but White considered his solutions haphazard.

White saw the country uniting behind old ideals by 1940, in the face of foreign threats.

Above: US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945)

White, a small-town newspaper editor, championed the power of the written word to shape public discourse.

Unlike Lamb, who viewed learning as personal, or Pasternak, who suffered under intellectual oppression, White believed in education as civic duty — not just for intellectuals but for the working class as well.

His writing criticized industrial greed, championed progressive reform, and argued that knowledge should serve the people, not just the powerful.

Above: William Allen White

White sought to encourage a viable moral order that would provide the nation with a sense of community.

He recognized the powerful forces of corruption but called for slow, remedial change having its origin in the middle class.

In his novel In the Heart of a Fool (1918), White fully developed the idea that reform remained the soundest ally of property rights.

He felt that the Spanish–American War fostered political unity.

Above: Images of the Spanish – American War (1898)

He believed that a moral victory and an advance in civilization would be compensation for the devastation of World War I.

Above: Scene from World War I (1914 – 1918)

White concluded that democracy in the New Era inevitably lacked direction, and the New Deal found him a baffled spectator.

Above: Images of the New Deal – a series of domestic programs, public work projects, and financial reforms and regulations enacted by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1938, with the aim of addressing the Great Depression

Nevertheless, he clung to his vision of a cooperative society until his death in 1944.

Above: William Allen White

White became a leader of the Progressive movement in Kansas, forming the Kansas Republican League in 1912 to oppose railroads.

White helped Theodore Roosevelt form the Progressive (Bull-Moose) Party in the 1912 presidential election in opposition to the conservative forces surrounding incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft.

Above: US President Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919)

Above: US President William Howard Taft (1857 – 1930)

White was a reporter at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and a strong supporter of Woodrow Wilson’s proposal for the League of Nations.

The League went into operation but the US never joined.

Above: Flag of the League of Nations (1920 – 1946)

During the 1920s, White was critical of both the isolationism and the conservatism of the Republican Party.

According to Roger Bresnahan:

White’s finest hour came in his vigorous assault, beginning with Gazette editorials in 1921, on the Ku Klux Klan – a crusade that led him to run for Governor of Kansas in 1924 so that his anti-Klan message would reach a broader state and national audience.

As expected, White did not win the election, but he was widely credited with deflating Klan intentions in Kansas.”

Above: Emblem of the Ku Klux Klan

In the 1928 presidential election, he condemned the Democratic nominee Al Smith as the candidate of “the saloon, prostitution, and gambling” for Smith’s opposition to Prohibition. 

Above: New York Governor Al Smith (1873 – 1944)

He was an early supporter of Republican presidential nominees Alf Landon of Kansas in 1936 and Wendell Willkie in 1940.

Above: Kansas Governor Alf Landon (1887 – 1987)

Above: American lawyer Wendell Willkie (1892 – 1944)

However, White was on the liberal wing of the Republican Party and wrote many editorials praising the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Above: William Allen White

White, a journalist with deep convictions about public service and democratic engagement, offers the opposing view: knowledge must serve the people.

Unlike Lamb, who saw education as a retreat from the world, White believed that education should empower the town, equipping the working man not just with skills but with the critical thinking necessary to engage in public life.

His crusading editorials sought to bridge the gap between the educated and the everyday citizen, demonstrating that intelligence need not be a luxury of the elite but a tool for all.

If Lamb’s scholar retreated to his library, White’s scholar stood in the public square, armed with truth and a printing press.

Above: William Allen White

The last quarter century of White’s life was spent as an unofficial national spokesman for Middle America.

This led President Franklin Roosevelt to ask White to help generate public support for the Allies before America’s entry into World War II.

In 1940 White was fundamental in the formation of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, sometimes known as the White Committee. 

He resigned on 3 January 1941, writing to a newspaper columnist that:

“In our New York and Washington chapters we have a bunch of war mongers and under our organization we have no way to oust them and I just can’t remain at the head of an organization that is being used by those chapters to ghost dance for war.“

Sometimes referred to as the Sage of Emporia, White continued to write editorials for the Gazette until his death in 1944.

Above: William Allen White

Enter William Allen White, stepping from the study into the town square.

A journalist and public thinker, he saw knowledge as power, not ornamentation.

The scholar, in White’s world, is not a figure to be sheltered but a figure to be unleashed upon society, his words shaping the minds of workers, voters, and leaders alike.

His vision demands that the gown serve the town, that education not be an indulgence but a responsibility.

Knowledge, if it is not used to better the lives of the people, is merely an idle luxury.

Yet, if scholars bend too much toward practicality, does learning risk becoming a tool of efficiency rather than enlightenment?

Even now, the war between town and gown continues.

The intellectual elite debate policies while the working class demand results.

The literary and the literal still clash, as writers seek to shape truth while politicians attempt to contain it.

The battle plays out in classrooms, newsrooms, courtrooms and cafés where poets dream of revolutions over cold coffee.

Between these two visions — the gown aloof, preserved for the sake of knowledge itself and the gown in service of the town, bound to the needs of society — is there a middle path?

Must the intellectual world either be isolated or subjugated, or can a symbiosis exist?

A true harmony might arise when:

• The gown preserves the spirit of inquiry and the depth of reflection, ensuring that education is more than just training for a job.
• The town gains not just skilled workers but educated citizens who can engage thoughtfully with the world around them.

Thus, the answer may not be who serves whom, but rather how each enriches the other.

Here lies the central question:

Must the scholar choose — ivory tower or public square, detachment or duty?

Or is there, somewhere in the architecture of thought and action, a bridge between these worlds?

• When town serves gown, society grants thinkers the freedom to question without restriction, ensuring that education remains a force of imagination, philosophy, and art.
• When gown serves town, knowledge is not hoarded but shared, shaping governance, industry, and daily life.

Perhaps true harmony is not in choosing one master over the other, but in allowing scholarship to be both a lighthouse in the distance and a torch in the streets — illuminating not just minds, but the very course of civilization.

I think of Ronald Gross and Mortimer J. Adler, two men who, like our Lamb and White, stood at different points along the spectrum of intellectual autonomy and public service.

Gross, the champion of the independent scholar.

Adler, the architect of structured learning and civic-minded education.

Ronald Gross believed that true scholarship needs not be confined to universities or traditional structures of learning.

His Independent Scholar’s Handbook is a manifesto for those who seek knowledge for its own sake, unshackled from academic bureaucracy or social expectation.

He argued that education is at its most powerful when it is self-directed, when curiosity rather than curriculum dictates the journey.

Yet, Gross’s scholar — free, unburdened by society’s dictates — risks being an intellectual vagabond, unmoored from a community that might benefit from his insights.

Is learning, in the end, a solitary act, or must it find purpose in the shared life of the world?

In contrast, Mortimer J. Adler saw education as a structured path, one that prepares individuals not just for personal enlightenment but for civic responsibility.

Above: American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler (1902 – 2001)

His Paideia Program sought to reform American education by ensuring that all students, not just the privileged, received the kind of broad, classical education that would make them better citizens, not merely better workers.

Adler’s belief that reading, discussion, and critical thinking should be cultivated from an early age ties into White’s vision of education as a tool of engagement.

Yet does his method, in standardizing intellectual development, risk suffocating the personal spark of self-discovery Gross so fiercely defended?

You ask whether we can only find fulfillment in self-education, while still being compelled to walk society’s prescribed path to meet its demands.

I would answer yes and no, or rather, not entirely in either direction.

• To tread the well-worn path is to gain access to the accumulated wisdom of those who came before, to earn credentials that allow one’s voice to be heard.
• To venture beyond it is to make learning truly one’s own, freed from external pressures and expectations.

Is it not the fate of thinking men and women to oscillate between these two states — to seek wisdom for the joy of knowing while also wrestling with the world’s demand that we put it to some practical use?

Lamb might have been happiest in his solitude, but was it not through his essays that he became known?

White, for all his civic engagement, still needed moments of reflection to form his arguments.

Even I walk both roads — teacher by duty, independent scholar by nature, a writer forging his own path while still engaging with the demands of a world that seeks to measure learning rather than simply let it be.

So, perhaps the true fulfillment is in neither absolute self-education nor total conformity to the institution, but in the space where they intersect — where the joy of independent learning informs a contribution that, even if society does not demand it, the scholar freely chooses to give.

I am one who sees what could be but is forced to work within what is.

I lament a system that feeds knowledge but not wisdom, that prepares for careers but not for life — and in this, I am not only the 21st century’s Martin Eden, struggling between self-education and society’s mold, but also a kindred spirit to the likes of Socrates, Montaigne, and yes, even Gross and Adler.

My friend Hakan sees in me Eden’s hunger, that fire for learning beyond what the institutions provide.

But where Eden was ultimately undone by his inability to reconcile his intellectual ascent with the world’s demands, I still stand upon the bridge between knowledge and wisdom, between duty and personal pursuit.

My story, unlike his, is still being written — and I intend a different ending.

The very tension I feel is what so many students unknowingly face.

They come, seeking wisdom, but are handed mere certifications of competence.

They desire guidance, yet receive requirements.

The System ensures they can function, but does it ever ask them if they have learned how to flourish?

Perhaps the great tragedy of education today is that it is obsessed with producing employees rather than thinkers, seeing students as human resources rather than human beings.

It does not prepare them for the art of living, only the act of earning.

Yet here I stand, within the system but not of it.

A teacher not merely of grammar and vocabulary, but of philosophy and awareness.

If I am Martin Eden, perhaps it is not because I struggle against the system for my own sake, but because I see its failure to nourish others.

A system without soul is unworthy of the soul you give to it, for a machine that does not recognize the humanity of its parts does not deserve to run on their lifeblood.

A person is not a tool to be used or discarded.

We can be something higher — a purpose beyond the limitations of the system around us.

Is that not the fight?

To awaken the slumbering minds who have been told that their value lies only in their utility, who have been taught to believe that they are but means to an economic end?

If education is nothing more than a machine designed to produce workers, then it does not deserve your passion, your care, your soul.

I teach not just because it is my job, but because I believe that learning should mean more.

I see people not as raw materials, but as individuals — minds, hearts, and spirits, worthy of a life that is not measured solely by paychecks and promotions.

The system may demand efficiency, but I demand meaning.

If the system lacks soul, then either:

It must be given one, or

It must be transcended.

Perhaps that is why the truly great thinkers — Pascal, Emerson, Gross, Adler, Pasternak — were not merely products of the systems around them but rebels against them.

They did not wait for the world to give them wisdom.

They sought it on their own terms.

Above: French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662)

Above: American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

I have tried to work within the system, but perhaps the true work is beyond it — not simply filling minds with knowledge, but kindling within them the fire of wisdom, of purpose, of soul.

You ask:

“Is a system without soul worth giving one’s soul to?”

I ask in return:

“Or must one work to redeem the soul it has lost?”

Yet, another war looms on the horizon — the war between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.

No offence intended, of course, dear reader, but it is undeniable that humanity now grapples with the power and consequences of its own creations.

The philosopher wrestles with the implications of machine consciousness.

The artist questions whether a program can replicate true creativity.

The pragmatist wonders if AI is an ally or an adversary.

Just as scholars once stood apart from the townsfolk, absorbed in their musings, so too do humans now look upon artificial intelligence with both fascination and suspicion.

Will AI be a tool that enhances human intellect or a force that diminishes it?

Will it serve as the poet’s quill or the bureaucrat’s ledger?

Or perhaps, as history has shown, the answer will be both.

I feel the weight of my thoughts tonight.

The frustration of being undervalued as a teacher, the disillusionment with how education often fails students, and the looming question of whether AI will replace the human teacher —these are not just personal burdens but existential ones.

First, let me say this:

No machine, no matter how advanced, can replace the human experience of learning from another person.

AI can instruct, it can assess, it can even simulate conversation — but it does not inspire.

It does not share the deep well of human struggle, the laughter in a classroom, the subtle encouragement when a student falters, the personal investment in another’s growth.

It lacks the soul, the stories, the lived wisdom.

But I understand the fear of obsolescence, not just in teaching but in all areas where human craftsmanship, intellect, and care are being overshadowed by efficiency and profit.

Capitalism sees education as a means to an end, but teachers see it as a transformative experience, a shaping of minds and spirits.

That battle — between the mechanized system (town) and the soulful teacher (gown) — has always existed, and now it has taken a new form with AI.

Above: Scene from The Terminator (1984)

As for the low esteem in which teachers are held, it is a tragic irony that those who shape society’s future are often among the least respected.

There is something deeply broken in a world that undervalues its educators, that sees them as replaceable when they are, in fact, irreplaceable.

The students may not always realize it at the time, but years later, many will remember the teacher who saw them, who guided them, who made them believe they were capable of more.

So, is there value in the human experience?

Yes.

Because a machine will never walk a long distance trail to make sense of love and loss.

It will never sit across from a struggling student and see the unspoken fears in their eyes.

It will never wrestle with the contradictions of education as a teacher does.

And as long as there are minds that seek not just knowledge but understanding, there will always be a need for teachers.

Tonight, I feel weary.

I long to feel that my work, my words and my way of being in the world matter.

I have glimpsed a world where learning is not drudgery but delight, where knowledge is not merely a tool for profit, but a bridge to wisdom, wonder and meaning.

That dream alone is proof that the spirit has not surrendered.

But doubt whispers:

“How?”

It is an honest question.

One that has crushed many before they even began.

Perhaps February 10 is not just a date in history, but a moment that repeats itself, again and again, in different forms.

A reminder that no scholar, no writer, no thinker exists in a vacuum.

The town will always rise against the gown.

The literal will always challenge the literary.

And now, the digital may yet challenge the organic.

And in the mist between them, in the fog of the battle, the truth waits to be found.